


The Crimson Solution

by yunitsa



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alchemy, Colonialism, Dragons, Giant Slug, Multi, POV First Person, pseudo-Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/pseuds/yunitsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phoebe Bannister's marriage to the alchemist Charles Templer might have been the end of one sort of story. But in sharing a house with her husband and his partner, the brilliant and irascible Benjamin Cole, Phoebe soon finds herself caught up in the complex relationship between the two men - and in the search for the most dangerous product of the alchemist's art.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an original work, but it had a very fanficcy beginning - there was a line in a book that needled me with its untapped possibilities. (Which book, and perhaps even which line, should soon become fairly obvious. I'd just like to point out, in a I-was-here-first sort of way, that the bulk of this was written in summer 2008, when the source fandom was infinitely smaller than it is now.) It's a slightly older story, and I might do some things differently if I were writing it now, but I wanted to share it with anyone who might enjoy it.
> 
> The story is complete, but in keeping with its Victorian serial nature, I'll be posting a chapter a day until it's done :) I hope you'll come along for the ride!

Soon after I came to live with my new husband in the house he shared with Mr. Benjamin Cole, the alchemist, there was some talk of firing the maid.

I remember that evening clearly – it was one of the first we three spent together in the dark little parlour of number 16, Aurelian Street, after Charles and I returned from our wedding journey. The time was just after dinner, and I was sitting on the hearthrug, arranging my small stock of books on their already-overflowing shelves. The cheaply-bound poems and novels and handful of school prizes looked out of place, I thought, among Cole’s scientific texts and my husband’s collection of more sensational literature. I listened to the clock in the corner ticking on its sequence of minutes – not yet used to the sound, just as I was still unused to the rumble of city traffic outside – and tried to ignore the argument occurring on the other side of the room.

Benjamin Cole and Charles were by the fireplace – Cole reclining in his chair with a glass of brandy by his elbow, and Charles standing before him with his hand on the mantelpiece. They seemed, as ever, a study in contrasts: Cole dark and thin, whittled down to the essentials, like the anatomical illustrations in my brother’s textbooks; my husband more solid and auburn-haired, tanned by long exposure to the sun.

If Charles was trying to loom – which was a rare opportunity, for Benjamin Cole was a tall man – then he was not succeeding. Charles made an imposing enough figure, with his broad chest and his limp (a relic of the New Carthaginian campaign) concealed in that posture, yet even a partial observer had to admit he was no match for his partner’s reserves of coiled energy.

“I fail to see why you are so upset at the suggestion,” Cole said. He leaned back in his chair with his eyes half-shut, looking as deceptively relaxed as an adder. “Two women about the place is surely excessive, considering our moderate way of life. And Miss Bannister could easily manage the everyday household tasks, saving us all the expense of that girl’s salary.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Charles protested. “You know Phoebe is to reside here as my wife, not as some sort of unpaid drudge to sweep the floors while you go about your work…”

“ _Our_ work,” Benjamin Cole said. I had turned back to my books, but I could imagine the way he was looking at Charles now: all that lassitude transformed into a single piercing blue glance. “Or so you have long led me to believe.”

Charles did not answer. I slid the last book into place, stood up, dusted off my skirts, and came over to join them. I appreciated Charles’s efforts on my behalf, for I could not help being intimidated. I had led a very circumscribed life, and Cole’s brilliant and eccentric character seemed (I thought then) to fall entirely outside its limits. But if my future existence in that house was to be at all tolerable, surely I would need to take a stand for myself.

“Mr. Cole,” I said, sitting down across from him, in Charles’s usual chair. “I appreciate for your forbearance in letting me stay here at all, and disrupt your bachelor establishment. But I would implore you not to fire Edith. She has had years of experience in arranging everything here as you like it, whereas I have none at all. You may think such skills come to women naturally, yet I could teach a sideboard grammar more readily than I could dust it; and as for my cooking, you should be glad to avoid the experiment.”

“Hm,” Cole said. He still avoided my gaze – as he had done ever since my arrival in Aurelian Street – and addressed only Charles. “Then, since I presume she _can_ add and subtract, would you have any objection to Miss Bannister making herself useful in the shop downstairs? Or is she perhaps to remain up here as a kind of decorative odalisque? If it is the latter, then I must inform you that you have not made a very suitable choice.”

There was an insult there, of course, but it was an insult to my appearance, about which I had never harboured any illusions. I took it as a sign of weakening.

“I can certainly add and subtract, sir, and read and write, too,” I said swiftly, before Charles could give voice to the anger I saw building in his face. “And I would like, as you say, to make myself useful. I should be very happy to work in your shop.”

And to cement this conditional victory – the only kind, I believed, that I was ever to have in my new residence – I reached across the table and poured myself a brandy. It was badly needed.

*

I came across the maid herself later that night, while climbing the precipitous staircase up to my new bedroom. Aurelian Street was old for Haven, a city lately risen into prosperity, and largely rebuilt in new styles. Dating from the time before our Kings were first called Emperor, the houses here stood tall and narrow and narrowed further still as they rose, as though retreating away from the street. The ground floor of number 16 was taken up by the shop and the laboratory; above it was the parlour with the small kitchen off, and then flights of stairs leading to Charles’s room and further on to Benjamin Cole’s. The highest chamber was an attic space under the eaves, where the servant had her lodging.

She was a Northerner girl called Edith Vogel, a few years younger than myself and looking younger still that evening: wrapped in her woollen shawl, candle in hand, the striking pale hair braided down her back. She paused on the landing, face framed in that circle of light as my own must have been.

 “Am I to be let go, ma’am?” Edith asked tremulously. Her voice still had a trace of its native accent, though carefully overlaid with the city vernacular.

“I very much hope not,” I said.

“Only I do not know where I would go, ma’am, if I was to lose my post here – I have no people in Haven, and not everyone will hire one of my kind.” She tugged fretfully on the end of the tell-tale braid. “And my parents need the money that I send.”

“They are still up North?” I asked. I had never known any true Northerners before. All my schoolbooks had taught me the long history of conquest and rebellion that had shaped the fate of this kingdom, claimed by both the ancient Carthaginians and the Northern invaders, before it finally grew strong enough to conquer them in turn. Our Empire now stretched all along the coast and west across the sea, to the lands half-colonised by Carthage so many years ago. When I imagined it, all I could see was ships – the ancient triremes and the modern steam vessels – crossing and recrossing the dividing ocean, bringing destruction in their wakes. All that I knew of history was death by water. I could not tell how this young servant-girl or her family lived, up in the poor cold reaches of the Empire, and I did not wish to offend her.

She nodded. She seemed eager to talk; I don’t suppose that Charles or Mr. Cole, busy as they were with their work, took much notice of who prepared their meals and tidied after them. “A fishing village. They’ve had a bad year of it, and they’re glad of what I send them, so long as I don’t mention what manner of shop…” She broke off, flushing.

“They don’t approve of alchemy?”

“They’re strict religious, up there. They say it’s a heathenish practise, like the New Carthies with all their gods, and apt to lead to all manner of wickedness.”

I had seldom given alchemy much thought, before the events that led to my marriage with Charles Templer, but I had always considered it a respectable sort of learned profession, like medicine or law, and more practical than natural philosophy. Certainly it had its ancient, occult roots, but it was several centuries now since modern training had brought the science into the light. Now I felt a thread of unease, encountering this new conviction. My brother had been so certain that I’d married well.

“And what do you think, Edith?” I asked.

She looked down, her hands knotted in her threadbare shawl, but she answered me. “Mssrs. Cole and Templer can be peculiar enough, closeted together until all hours as they are, and with the laboratory not to be cleaned unless they’re watching. But it’s decent work I have here, ma’am. And I think what they do can’t be wrong if it’s in nature; and as for spells and incantations, they say it’s only the black magicians who use those, which I know the gentlemen ain’t. And now, if you can live here, and you a parson’s daughter…”

It was a bold speech for a servant girl, but when she glanced up at me from beneath the brim of her cap, her look was not sly but nervous, seeking for my approval. I knew it from my former students’ faces – though surely, I thought, one ought not to treat a servant like a student. I had so little experience of running a household: there had been no servants in our house when I was a girl.

“My father was a Free-thinking parson,” I said at last, painfully reluctant, but feeling that I owed her that much for her candour.

Edith brought a pale hand to her mouth. “Oh, you will not wish to have that known, ma’am! Have you not read the papers lately?”

“I’ve been away on my wedding journey in the south,” I said, as lightly as I could, despite the chill that went through me. “And now I live with two gentlemen, so I rarely have a chance at a fresh newspaper. Why, what do they say?”

Her voice was as hushed as though conveying state secrets. “Why, that if the war’s not yet won, after all these years, it must be because of people on this side the water undermining the government. Northerners, and Free-thinkers, and those who are part New Carthie themselves. _Suspect elements_ , they say.”

“What nonsense,” I answered, with less firmness than I would have liked. And I had to add, “Has anyone been giving you trouble, Edith?”

She shook her head. “But I’d be very badly off if I lost my post, ma’am.”

“You won’t,” I assured her. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“Oh, thank you, ma’am.” She bobbed a curtsy to me, and then added, emboldened, “It _is_ a good house, ma’am, and they’re good gentlemen. But you’ll soon see – there’s no interfering between them.”

*

This wasn’t talk I wished to encourage, though I knew the truth of what Edith Vogel had said. That night, undressing for bed in the room that, only a few days before, had been Charles’s alone, I saw that he was still upset over his argument with Cole in the parlour.

“He should not have spoken to you – about you – in that way,” Charles muttered, tugging off his socks with sharp, ineffectual jerks. “I should not permit him to speak to you in that way.”

“It’s all right,” I said. I tied off my plait and hung up my dressing-gown on the nail, turning down the covers. The motions were becoming natural to me, settling into a routine, and even in the midst of my concerns, the awareness of that thrilled me. I had never thought that I might be married, but then, I had never imagined such a person as Charles. “Really, my dear. I know what Mr. Cole can be like – I learned that much during all the dreadful business at Feversham. I know he’s a good man at heart; as he must be, to have earned your friendship. I only hope that we can all learn to live here together, for I should hate for you to be unhappy.”

Ready at last, Charles got into bed beside me and put his hands on my shoulders. It was a narrow bed, where he had slept in his bachelor days; but at that stage in our relations, we did not mind it. He looked at me very seriously, so close that I could see the flecks of hazel in his eyes.

For the countless time, I tried to examine objectively the man who was now my husband: his neatly-trimmed hair, the strong line of his shoulders, the weathered skin prematurely crinkling around his mouth. His campaign scars went deeper than the flesh, I knew, and yet he still retained his innate kindness and good humour. On our honeymoon, spent in the south after the late summer wedding, we had climbed over old Carthaginian ruins by moonlight and I had wiped foolish tears from my face while he slept, knowing that, for all that I thought myself so rational when I agreed to marry him, I had finished by loving him terribly. It might have been easier for me if I had not.

“Could you bear to live here?” he asked me now. “Honestly? God knows Benjamin isn’t easy to get along with at the best of times; and I confess, he seems to have taken against you in particular, ever since you first became engaged to me. It isn’t like him, but then he has never been a great supporter of marriage.”

I smiled, leaning against him, trying to sound naturally light-hearted and not like a mere child out of her depth. “Too many women about the place by far. I don’t suppose that _he_ will ever—”

I felt Charles stiffen and knew that it had been the wrong thing. “No,” he said in a low voice, “Benjamin is not the sort to marry. But it isn’t that he really dislikes you, you know. He was full of praises for your capabilities at Feversham Academy. Only…”

“Only the two of you have lived and worked here for three years together, and now I’ve come along to disrupt the equilibrium you’ve built. I do realise that.”

“We could move,” Charles said with sudden excitement, holding me closer. “We could get rooms somewhere nearby, and I could still come here every day to assist Benjamin. Or I could open my own practice, something more orthodox…So that you need not be ashamed…”

“My dear, don’t talk nonsense,” I interrupted. There was something feverish in his enthusiasm: I could not credit it. “I can see you love this work, precisely the way that you and Mr. Cole do it, and,” I swallowed with difficulty, knowing it a lie, “I am not so very dependent on the world’s opinion. Besides, could we simply leave him here on his own?”

Charles looked troubled; I brushed my hand over his cheek, hoping to comfort him. “No, it’s true,” he said. “Cole is a sadly melancholic type, and he was once…That is to say, the work can be like an addiction to him, from which he will not surface for days. He was in a sorry state when I first came to stay with him, Phoebe. People crossed the street to avoid the Aurelian Street black magician.”

It seemed that some of them still did, I thought, recalling my conversation with Edith; but I saw his point. It was difficult to imagine Benjamin Cole without Charles’s moderating influence. “You must have been very brave,” I said, still touching his face. It seemed sometimes that I could not stop touching him: though not naturally demonstrative, I had for so long been starved of affection. “To chance the fury of such a dragon.”

“I was very poor,” he answered ruefully. “After my time in the army, I thought I had forgotten everything I ever knew of alchemy. I came here looking for work as a shopboy, after every other establishment in Haven had already turned me down. And instead…”

“Instead you became assistant and partner to the most brilliant and radical alchemist of his day. Solving scientific enigmas and rescuing fair damsels, and back to the laboratory by tea-time.”

Charles did not share my attempt at levity. “And I became his friend,” he said. “You would not think it from the way he’s acting now, but Benjamin Cole has been a true and loyal friend to me.”

I winced, feeling pain lodge like a stone beneath my breastbone. “And yet you say that you would leave him, for my sake.”

“Of course.” He looked down at me with an expression of forced calm, and bent to kiss me. “I’m ready to end my adventuring days now, Phoebe, if you wish it. I want the two of us to make a life together.”

As he reached to snuff out the light, I thought: _I know he is telling the truth. I know he would do it, I know he really does care for me_. And I knew, too, more resigned to it now than I had been among the cypresses and ruins of Carthage, that I loved him too much to make him leave.

It was a while before I slept, even after Charles was breathing evenly beside me. We had both spoken of Feversham so casually, as though it was in the ancient past for us; and yet, for me at least, it was not so. Poor Charles had witnessed many dreadful things in his life, but that had been my one live horror.

Yet at least it made it easier to bear Benjamin Cole’s hostility now, if I remembered the moment in the cellars beneath the school, when he had held me back from seeing what had become of the Headmistress’s body – his wiry arms around me like a vice; not cold as I had somehow expected, but feverishly warm in that dark place.

“Miss Bannister, I beg you, don’t!”

I had been indignant with him, because it was easier than facing head-on the roaring tide of my bewilderment and grief. “Why won’t you let me go to her?” I’d demanded. “Because I am a woman – because you think I am too weak to bear it?”

“No one, man or woman,” Cole had said, “should have to see what it beyond that door. I only wish I myself could forget it.”

His crushing grip loosened, but he did not release me entirely. And Benjamin Cole, that driven scientific investigator who seemed to despise all feminine emotion – he had held me while I wept, gently stroking my hair.

*

It was thus that I began working at Cole & Templer’s Alchemy Shop of Aurelian Street. I soon learned that an alchemist’s was not an apothecary, though they sometimes supplied them; that Charles tended to prepare the everyday merchandise and buy their ingredients, while Cole remained shut up in his laboratory, but that these roles were not absolutely fixed: sometimes they would both remain shut in for days at a time, watching over some experiment, and leaving me to make their excuses to the customers. On those days, Charles came to bed (when he came at all) exhausted but too exalted for sleep.

In those first weeks, I tried to gather as much knowledge as I could about a discipline in which I had never been trained; and to keep out of Mr. Cole’s way and avoid unnecessarily offending him; and to convince Charles that I was perfectly contented. On any of these counts, I am not sure how well I succeeded.

And that was the way matters stood in our household – that was the peaceful but uneasy way they might have gone on for some time – when it was disrupted by an unexpected visit from my brother.


	2. Chapter 2

 I was down in the shop that day as usual, trying to make some sense of the account books – for all the attention Cole and Charles paid to detail in their alchemical work, they were dreadfully slipshod in their bookkeeping. The pages were littered with cross-outs, transpositions, arrows pointing to marginal notes too crabbed and smudged for me to read. It had taken me half the day to decipher the orders from the receipts.

I had happened to glance up from the page in order to rest my strained eyes, when I first saw him. There could be no mistaking it: there was James, in his dark top-hat and overcoat with his medical bag in hand, strolling along our unfashionable street with – I saw as he came closer – a look of marked distaste and anxiety upon his face. This only increased when he found his destination, which was evidently our own doorway.

I imagined how it would appear from the street, to someone of my brother’s disposition. The inscription above looked decent enough – _COLE & TEMPLE, ALCHEMISTS_, in flourishing gilded script – but the same could not be said, alas, for the shopfront. Rather than advertising our wares directly, it served as a repository for all the items which Mr. Cole could not manage to fit elsewhere, yet was reluctant to dispose of. There were flasks and tubes and cauldrons, death’s heads and pickled organic specimens, and even an enormous stuffed crocodile. It was not a sight to comfort my brother’s eminently respectable heart.

After a hesitation, however, I heard the bell ring as he opened the door. I turned away from the window at once, going to welcome him. “James, my dear! How are you keeping?”

“Phoebe,” he said with evident surprise. “I didn’t think to find you here.”

For a moment, I could not understand him – surely he knew where I was now living – and then I saw what he meant. To his mind, a shop was no place for a lady, even if she had no other way to earn her keep.

I came over and pressed his hand between mine, for I truly was happy to see him. James had come to my wedding, of course: he had given me away very solemnly, and his congratulations had been muted. He was glad to have me officially off his hands and settled, I was sure – though it was years since I had required anything of him – but he had not entirely approved of my choice. Still, now that the thing was done and we were living in the same city at last, I had hoped to see more of him.

“And how are Meg and the boys?” I asked.

“Very well, thank you.” He was still standing by the door, looking very awkward among the accoutrements of the alchemical trade: I feared for the beaker of blue liquid by his elbow. I was determined to set him as his ease, however.

“Would you like to come upstairs for some tea? What is it that brings you here?”

“Ah, yes. In fact…” James cleared his throat. “I came hoping to see Mr. Benjamin Cole.”

“Oh,” said I in bemusement. If he had confessed to worshipping one of the New Carthaginian revel gods, I could not have been more surprised. “I believe he’s in his laboratory, just at the back.”

I turned the sign in the window from _OPEN_ to _CLOSED_ and led my brother through the shop, negotiating carefully between shelves of equipment and alchemical preparations. Cole’s workroom, where he conducted all of his most delicate and dangerous experiments, lay through a small door set in the panelled wall.

I opened it tentatively, so as not to startle Mr. Cole at his labours: I had not been there long, but already I knew better than that. I might have spared myself the pains, however, for he was utterly absorbed in what he was doing, and did not even glance up at our entrance.

Once, I might have thought of Benjamin Cole’s laboratory as something out of a picture: the bellows, the crucibles, the distillery, the diagrams and ancient tomes propped open upon every surface; the wraith-thin man bent over his desk in rapt concentration with scalpels and forceps in hand. An allegorical painting, perhaps: _The Alchymist in his Study_. Now, from exposure, it was all becoming commonplace to me – it was only my husband’s friend and partner at his work. Even I could not repress a start, however, at the task in which he was currently engaged.

He was dissecting some sort of sea-creature: deeply purple and veined, large enough to occupy the entire surface of his desk. I knew it was not alive – no modern alchemist worth the name would stand for vivisection, and for all they said about Mr. Cole, I knew him to be an honourable man – yet still I shuddered at the spasmodic twitching of its tentacles.

“Ha!” Benjamin Cole cried suddenly. He whirled around to where we stood, brandishing a pulsating black mass in one hand. “I have been attempting to extract this creature’s ink for analysis, to ascertain what manner of thing it is. And here is the ink-sack, sir!” He thrust it nearly into my brother’s face, causing him to back away precipitously. “Does that appear natural to you? Have you ever seen anything like it? Far larger than expected, even given the creature’s size, and the wrong colour entirely. I shall have to run some tests, of course…”

“You’ll remember my brother, Mr. Cole,” I interrupted, as soon as I could. “Dr. James Bannister.”

Cole looked at James a little blankly, as though he had just been awakened from a dream. “Yes, of course,” he said. “You will forgive me if I don’t shake hands.”

“Naturally,” James stammered, still staring at those be-slimed and stained appendages. Cole glanced down with a grimace, and went to wash at the ewer in the corner.

“Was there something you wanted?” he asked over his shoulder. Anyone unused to his manner would have suspected him of deliberate rudeness, and I winced inwardly at what James must think.

“I have come to speak to you about a professional matter,” my brother began, drawing himself up in a way I knew to be wary of – it presaged a lengthy tirade. “But if you are too preoccupied with your repulsive tinkering, I…”

“I shall be with you in a moment,” Benjamin Cole cut in, and, for a wonder, my brother actually ceased to be speak. Cole took off his apron, rolled down his sleeves, and resumed his tweed jacket: with the ink marks on his cuffs concealed, he looked almost presentable. “Shall we proceed upstairs? I imagine you’d be more comfortable away from the evidence of my...repulsive tinkering.”

We went up to the parlour accordingly, where I busied myself with ordering and pouring out tea while Mr. Cole waved my brother to a chair.

“And Mr. Templer?” James asked, accepting a cup and saucer.

Benjamin Cole looked to me for an answer, though I knew that it galled him to do so. “He returned from the customs house about an hour ago,” I said. “He’ll be in his room now, resting his leg.”

“Would it be possible for him to join us?” James sounded pained, leaving me to wonder with increased urgency what the matter could possibly be.

“Certainly,” I said, and went up to fetch Charles. As we were coming down the stairs together, I heard my brother explain, “I have been informed that you and Mr. Templer work best as a partnership.”

“That has been true in the past,” Cole said flatly. “But now that Charles Templer is a married man and your brother-in-law, I would no longer count on his involvement in the more _outré_ aspects of our business. And such, of course, I can only assume this to be. You will already have tried all the more reputable alchemical establishments in the city.”

Descending into the room, I saw by James’s flush that Cole had hit upon the truth.

“Nonsense, my dear fellow,” Charles said to his friend, releasing my shoulder. The old wound in his leg was bothering him particularly that day, perhaps because of the change in the weather, and he had needed to lean on me to guide him down the steps. “I am as committed to every aspect of our business as on the day I first joined you, as well you know. Now, shall we sit down and listen to what this gentleman has to say? How d’you do, Bannister?”

“ _I_ am well enough,” James said, fiddling with his cup and saucer. “But the things I have seen….You are aware, of course, that I am a medical man?”

Having distributed tea all around, I sat down quietly in a chair by the sideboard. Strictly speaking, of course, I had no dispensation to be there: it was Charles and Cole’s business, to which I was attached only in an auxiliary role, and only out of necessity. I knew Benjamin Cole, at least, would hardly thank me for remaining. But as it was my own brother in the case, and as, moreover, I was terribly curious about what could have brought him there, I decided this once to chance his displeasure.

“I might have gathered as much from your bag,” Cole was answering dryly. “Not to mention your title. You have a practice up in Mannering Terrace, I believe, from which you relieve old men of gout and ague and their money.”

“That is correct so far as it goes,” James replied curtly. He was glancing about the room with a nervous look, though I could not guess what he was afraid of: it was a perfectly ordinary parlour. Did he expect a demon or an animal familiar to come bursting through the door? “I have had several cases of late, however, which exceed the usual limits of my practice. And the most recent one…”

“You had best tell us everything in order, Dr. Bannister.”

“Yes, certainly.” He took a gulp of his tea and winced – it was the inferior kind grown in the south, trade having been stopped by the New Carthaginian blockade; I suppose the New Town where he lived still had illegal sources. “The first case was about two weeks ago, and to be quite frank with you, I was thrilled to get it. Lady Elridge, the General’s wife: I thought to serve as her physician might set me up for life, particularly as she has always been prone to hypochondria.

“I had expected something of that nature in this instance. It soon came out, however, that I had been called in only because all her usual physicians were at a loss. She was truly ill this time: her eyes were swollen shut, her face gone scarlet as though all the capillaries had ruptured. She complained of a great lassitude. And what is more….” James took another sip of tea. “The doctors, of course, had tried to bleed her. Upon my arrival, I attempted the same. You know we generally take a few pints of blood at most, but this time…Mr. Cole, she _would not_ stop bleeding. Through her arms where they had been scarified, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Her very skin sweated blood – more blood than any human body can be supposed to hold. In the midst of it, she died, and I could do nothing to save her.”

Charles frowned at this grisly recital, worrying his own tea-cup between his hands, but Benjamin Cole’s face remained impassive. “Go on,” he said. “You said it was the first occurrence.”

“Some days later,” James continued, “I was summoned to the sickbed of Mr. Featherstonehaugh, a merchant-banker. He was suffering from fever and insomnia; naturally, I recommended a rest cure. Some time away from the city, perhaps at one of the seaside bathing places. He agreed to consider it, though he said that pressing business kept him in Haven. Three days later, he was dead – of liver failure, though his liver had never given him any trouble before.”

“This Featherstonehaugh, what was his character?”

“He was a well-liked man – an honest dealer and a known philanthropist. If he had any vice, it was his fondness for the fairer sex.” James lowered his voice, looking uneasily towards the corner where I was attempting to make myself invisible. “I have several times had to treat him for…well. But before that last episode, he had been in perfect health.

“The third occasion was this week, and I confess it to be the most puzzling. Colonel Warner had been seeing me for rheumatism: one of my most distinguished patients. He called me in with a trivial complaint, for which in the end he refused treatment. Last night, he was found dead in his bedroom.”

“I see,” Cole said slowly. He and Charles exchanged glances, silently communicating questions and theories. “Have the victims’ bodies been interred?”

“The first two.”

“Damnation. I should have liked to have seen them. And Warner?”

“He is laid out at home, while they wait for his nephew to return for the burial. The place is Darley Manor, just south-west of the city limits. My patients preclude me from accompanying you there, but I can write you a letter of introduction.”

“Please do, Doctor.” He leaned back in his chair, steepling his long fingers together under his chin. “It is an interesting problem, and I can see why you would wish to consult an alchemist in the matter, despite the unfortunate rivalry that has developed between our professions. I shall investigate it for you. I imagine you are acting out of a disinterested spirit of inquiry in bringing this to our attention?”

James flushed. “It hurts my practise to have three unexplained deaths to my credit, sir, I’m sure you can _imagine_ that. Of course, I shall reimburse you for your time and efforts.”

Cole waved a languid hand. “Let us not speak of money, Dr. Bannister, you are among friends. We can discuss any terms between us later. Now, if those are all the relevant details…?”

“They are,” James said, rising to his feet. For the first time, he seemed to notice that Charles and I remained in the room: I knew the mesmerizing effect exuded by Benjamin Cole’s attention. “Phoebe. My wife has been asking after you lately; perhaps, if you are not engaged, you and your husband might join us tonight for dinner?”

It was a formal invitation for one’s own sister, but then that had always been his way: my earliest memories were of James pitting himself against our parents to insist upon his dignity. “Of course,” I said, looking to Charles for confirmation. “We’d be happy to come.”

“We shall expect you at seven, then.”

Cole barely waited until he was out of earshot before saying (to Charles, of course), “Don’t you think your time might be better served by beginning work on this puzzle Bannister’s brought us? I am going to Darley tonight to examine the Colonel’s body.”

“My dear fellow,” Charles answered, evidently discomfited, “I can hardly refuse my wife’s brother for dinner. I’m sure you’re perfectly capable of examining the body yourself – indeed, you will learn far more than I ever could from it.”

“Doubtless,” Cole said shortly. “I will leave you to your diversions.” And he went to fetch his coat and hat, without a word more to either of us.


	3. Chapter 3

I sat before my shabby second-hand dressing table, studying my reflection critically. It was a deeply unremarkable face: one passed its like in the street every day. Dark eyes with a perpetual touch of alarm about them, small nose and a pointed chin, a good Imperial complexion. My years at Feversham had left little schoolmistress-ish tucks around my mouth: no longer in the first flush of youth, as they say, but not so very much past it. Light brown hair, very fine and  resistant to pins.

I dampened my hands in the ewer and did my best with it. I felt oddly nervous. I had often been to visit James before, of course – in school holidays – especially after he married and the twins were born. But this would be my first time entering his house as a respectable married woman in my own right. Did I wish, I wondered, for his respect? For him to be proud of me?

“You look lovely,” Charles said, pausing to drop a kiss on my bare shoulder. I smiled at him in the mirror and fastened my locket around my neck: the Headmistress had given it to me for my last birthday, and I now wore it often in remembrance of her.

“I’m as ready as I will be,” I told him, gathering my wrap and reticule, and stood admiring Charles as he donned his jacket and coat. In evening-wear, with his neat hair and tanned, clean-shaven face, the alchemical stains on his hands hidden by gloves, he made a striking picture of the perfect Haven gentleman.

The observation nagged at me, however, as we descended the stairs. As a pair, we looked so ordinary that one could have had us engraved us into a history book, as a study of our place and era. It was only Benjamin Cole who made us in any way exceptional, and he was not with us that night – busy with the examination of a corpse. I should have been grateful, but for a bare instant I regretted it.

I did not share this thought with Charles as we emerged onto the street. The fog was in from the sea, surrounding the newly-installed phlogiston lamps with misty halos, and giving a wet sheen to the cobblestones. Charles had an umbrella, which he used as a walking stick, but it would be of no help in this weather – the moisture hung in all directions at once, cold and clinging.

He offered me his arm, though I tried to place no weight upon it, and rather give him my own support: I suspected his leg must be agony. As it was not a theatre evening, we were easily able to catch a cab at the next crossing. I watched the streets of Haven pass by as we clattered along, the house lights and the shop windows. It all still new to me; I had not lived in the city since I was a child, before I was sent away to school.

My brother’s house in Mannering Terrace was in the new part of town, away from the warren of ancient streets where we resided. This district sat on a rise overlooking the rest of Haven, with elegant tree-lined crescents, plentiful phlogiston lighting and stern townhouses of grey stone. It was the home of bankers and officers, as well as a doctor determined to gain a practice in high society.

33 Mannering Terrace was among the last houses on that street: a newer build, but with an imposing entrance-way announcing James’s business. A maid let us in to a bright, clean hall that smelled unmistakeably of a doctor’s surgery: for a moment, giving her my wrap to hang, I felt like an arriving patient. But then Meg was there, pressing my chilled hands and kissing my cheeks, and the impression quickly faded.

Marrying Meg, I have often thought, was the wisest decision that my brother ever made. She had brought him a fortune with which set up his practice, but she has also brought a great deal of kindness, and common sense, and an utter lack of pretension. Flaws remained in his character that I could not be blind to, but Meg was making him more human every year, less painful anxious about appearances.

“It’s so good to see you, Phoebe,” she was exclaiming. “And you too, Charles. What an awful wet night, but I’m so glad you could come, and at such short notice.”

That brought us to the drawing-room, where James shook Charles’s hand and poured out the sherries among the old mahogany bookcases. James had kept our parents’ furniture for his family quarters, so that even in this modern aspiring doctor’s house, there were rooms where I could feel at home.

“I’d better put the twins to bed before we sit down,” Meg said. “I’m afraid it’s the nursemaid’s evening off today. Poor Alice has kept them quiet admirably thus far, but they shall want me for bedtime.”

“Can I be of any assistance?” I offered.

“Oh, that would be a kindness.” As we climbed the stairs together, she added, “To be honest, the silence worries me. And I did wish to speak to you alone.”

Before I had a chance to ask what she meant, we were in the nursery – a controlled chaos of toy bricks and velveteen animals – and two small boys with identical freckled faces were rushing at us. They embraced Meg first, of course, but I was gratified that they still recognised their Auntie Phee from my previous visits.

“And how are you, Master Fred?” I asked the one who was clinging to my skirts. “Or is it Jamie?”

“Fred,” Meg told me. “Jamie is in blue today. I can’t always tell either,” she added.

With the servant’s help, we were able to get the two of them bathed and into bed, though they insisted the whole way that they were not the least tired. Nearly four years old, their vocabularies had increased tremendously since I saw them last, and I felt rather more comfortable in their company. Infants made me feel dull and helpless, but I liked children well enough once they were at an age for speech: they reminded me of my youngest charges at Feversham.

“My mother was one of twins,” Meg said, once Jamie and Fred were tucked in and sung to and we were able to tiptoe out of the nursery. “So you mustn’t worry: they’re from my side of the family and not yours.”

I flushed once I understood her, and more so when another thought occurred to me. “Oh,” I said, “but I’m not certain what Mr. Cole would think of Charles and I having children.”

“It isn’t any of his business, surely?” She took my hand and led me into her own little sitting-room, furnished all in pink and pale green. “Now, Phoebe, you know it’s the first time I’ve got you alone since you were married. I should have come to call before this, I know, but with James and the twins…”

“It’s all right,” I said, “I understand.” I understood more than she was saying: James would not like for his wife to be seen in that part of the city, let alone entering our establishment.

“But are you happy?” Meg asked me. “Truly?”

I looked into her wide, pretty face, trying to form my answer. “Yes,” I said at last. “Of course I am. I care for Charles very much, and I know that he cares for me.”

“Well, I am glad to hear it,” she said briskly. “And I confess, it’s a relief to me. I was so afraid, after those dreadful things that happened, that you were simply casting yourself upon the man who saved you from them, all in a rush. Though I know it isn’t like you.”

“It isn’t,” I assured her. “And in any case, if my hand was to serve as a reward for my saviour at Feversham, I might now be Mrs. Benjamin Cole.” The idea – the very sound of it – was so absurd that I nearly laughed aloud, had not some deep-set jagged thing prevented me, like a splinter in the throat.

“Your brother and I love each other too, you know, in our way,” Meg went on. “But we have such separate lives – me with the children, James with his practice. We say ‘how’d you do’ in the evenings, and there’s our marriage. All couples must find their own balance.”

She was always perceptive: I shouldn’t have been surprised that she guessed so easily at the source of my troubles. “I don’t wish Charles and I to have separate lives,” I said. “I want for us to share everything, as far as we can. But, you see, he already…”

I couldn’t go on: it wasn’t something I could give voice to, not to her and not in this house. “They’ll be wondering where we’ve got to,” I said weakly.

Meg squeezed my hand: despite all the things I could not say, I was extremely glad for her just then. “Then we had better go down,” she said, “and keep our men in order.”

*

In the drawing-room, James and Charles were discussing some sort of sporting competition that had recently taken place between the colleges of the King’s University.

“Of course, I have no practical knowledge of the mechanics,” Charles was saying. “We didn’t row at Redstone – no river nearby.”

“At Redstone?” James repeated.

I knew that he was only being difficult, and what is more, I was certain that so did Charles, but he answered amicably enough. “Redstone Alchemical College, yes, where I had my education.”

“It seems such an everyday name for an alchemical college,” Meg put in lightly. “No reference to the divine Hermes or the Age of Saturn at all.”

“Lord Redstone, who founded it, believed firmly that alchemy ought to be conducted on modern scientific lines,” Charles explained. “He was a noted alchemist himself, of course, in the last century, but he had no patience for what he called out-moded obscurantist jargon. Though there were people at the time who claimed – whether out of malice or genuine belief, I cannot say – that his own title was an alchemical pun. For the red of the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, you know.”

The maid arrived to tell us that dinner was served, and we all repaired to the dining room. Sitting down at the table with its fine porcelain and white tablecloth, I felt the normality of it all surround me like a warm blanket: all over Haven and the country, family parties in well-lit rooms would be sitting down together thus, clinking silverware and folding napkins over their laps. It was difficult, in that moment, to imagine returning to the dark alchemy shop with its dusty alembics and death’s heads in the window, and Benjamin Cole brooding over it all like some ancient magus.

Perhaps I was wrong to shake my head at James’s passion for respectability: respectability meant comfort and security, meant never fearing that one fell short of society’s expectations, that one might become the object of suspicion or fear. He carried it to an extreme I could laugh at, yes, but we had never been so very different. We shared the same past, after all: the same night-terrors.

Conversation around the table seemed destined to follow the confused trail of my own thoughts. “I do wonder, Templer,” James said over the soup, “what made a fellow like yourself choose that sort of occupation. Presumably your people approved it?”

“They urged it, in fact,” Charles replied. “My uncle was an alchemist, you see, and there was talk of me following him into the trade. I was educated accordingly. Unhappily, by the time I returned from service in New Carthage, he had died and his practice already been sold.”

“It was not your own preference, then?” my brother asked.

“Not exactly, although I did not mind it. I applied myself very diligently to my studies, but it was not until I met Benjamin Cole that I acquired a true passion for alchemy.”

James frowned. “Ah, yes. You’ll forgive me for saying this, Templer, but do you think it entirely wise to continue your association with that person? Particularly now that you have a family to consider…”

I could see at once that Charles was not at all inclined to forgive him. “I cannot conceive what you might mean,” he said coldly.

It would take more than that to deter my brother, however: as soon as the courses had been changed, James went on. “Cole is a maverick and a genius, I’ll grant you, that is widely acknowledged, but you must be aware of his reputation – even in alchemical circles. And then, of course, his connection with Mortimer, the black magician—”

“Is a rumour and a damned lie, sir.” I heard Charles’s chair-legs scrape on the floor, as though he was on the verge of rising and issuing a challenge on the spot, and wished desperately that convention did not forbid me from sitting beside him. My hands clenched hard around my napkin.

“I meant no offence,” James began: even seated and with a bad leg, Charles’s anger was formidable. “My dear Templer, I only meant—”

Charles was visibly willing himself to calm, breathing deeply, and took a sip of his wine before he answered. “You have been misled, then. Benjamin may be personally eccentric, but there is no fault to be found in either his methods or his—” _Morals_ , I suppose he meant to say. “Allegiances.”

“Then clearly I _have_ been misled,” James replied, regaining his assurance now that he no longer felt personally threatened. “My practice, you see, sometimes takes me among the members of the Generality – only junior members, of course – and one hears such things…”

It was James at his very worst, even for me who loved him. I feared that Charles might have an apoplexy. Meg and I exchanged desperate looks across the table: we had left them too long at the sherry.

“People _do_ have the strangest ideas about alchemists,” I said brightly, trying to steer the conversation away from personalities. “All those women who come to our shop for love-philtres, for instance, when of course we sell nothing of the sort. Alchemy may be an orderly scientific discipline, the same as any other branch of natural philosophy, but for the popular imagination, there is still that tint of magic about it. Though, of course, no reasonable person would credit such things.”

I was not being particularly subtle, but fortunately Meg picked up the thread from there. “When I was very small,” she said, “I thought I knew a hedge-witch. I was staying with my aunt in the country – you remember Aunt Muriel, James, she had that cat who bit you – and all the village children were convinced…”

She told her story, and then she asked Charles about New Carthage – something very innocuous about the markets there, unlikely to bring up bad memories – and said that she must show him the New Carthaginian shawl she had bought from a blockade-runner lately, he might be able to tell her if it were genuine, and finally we had finished our meal.

Meg ran up for the shawl while we were dressing. It was a very beautiful deep red colour, accented by gold embroidery, but Charles frowned as he ran his hands over it.

“It was certainly woven in New Carthage,” he said, “and it is very fine. But it is not the real alchemical shade. This is a close imitation made from the secretions of sea-snails – it does have that look of clotted blood, which will only deepen with time. But the true Carthaginian purple changes colour by the moment.”

“Well, then I do not mind after all,” Meg said. “A shawl that changed colour by the moment would be terribly difficult to match a hat to. Now, must you go?”

She did not really mean to detain us, any more than we wished to stay. But the mention of blood had reminded me of James’s business with Cole, and hence of something else. “Here,” I said, reaching into my reticule, “I should like you to have this. Just in case it’s ever needed.”

“What is it?” James asked, as he accepted the piece of card – heavy, like old-fashioned stationary – which I handed to him.

“It’s an alchemically-treated paper that Mr. Cole has recently perfected. There is a twin sheet with which it is in sympathy, which I shall keep: anything you write here will be copied instantly onto mine, and vice versa. It’s so much faster than the telegraph.” I attempted a smile. “We haven’t got a trade name for it yet, but once it’s put on sale, I expect it will prove quite popular.”

James held the sheet between the tips of two fingers, looking at it as though it were a viper. “But Phoebe…We really can’t accept…That is,” he went on, rallying, “whether or not I have been misled about him, I will not have any invention of _that_ man’s inside my house.”

I could feel Charles drawing himself up behind me, and I feared that nothing would prevent a full-blown scene. I would have been at a loss for what to do, if at that moment Meg had not snatched the paper from her husband’s hand and tucked it neatly into her pocket.

“It’ll be a handy thing to have in an emergency,” she said firmly. “Thank you, Phoebe.”

Then it only remained for us to say our goodbyes to them both, with promises to come again soon which I did not expect we would keep. It would have been impossible, of course, for us to reciprocate their hospitality.

*

We returned to Aurelian Street to find Benjamin Cole curled up in his chair in the parlour with his arms about his knees. The low fire in the grate provided the only illumination, showing the sharp lines of his profile and his hands resting pale against his dressing gown: fine embroidered silk, tattered with long use. The air was thick with the New Carthaginian incense he liked to burn when he was thinking. It made my eyes water.

“There you are,” Charles said quietly, putting down the umbrella and unbuttoning his coat.

Cole seemed to surface as though from a dream, his eyes regaining focus from their abstracted contemplation of the fire. “Have you had a pleasant evening?” he inquired, with a shadow of his former asperity.

“It was well enough.” He was hardly, I saw, going to pass on James’s foolish accusations. “Did you learn anything at Darley?”

“I took samples of the body’s fluids for analysis, and I interviewed the household. Apparently, he took ill only three days ago.”

“His rheumatism?”

Cole shook his head. “His rheumatism had nothing to do with it. In fact, it had undergone a marked improvement lately – whether due to our friend Bannister’s exertions or in spite of them, we’ll never know. No, Warner complained of pains in his stomach. Bannister was summoned, found his heart-rate to be highly elevated, and offered to bleed him, but Warner refused.”

“Then he died of a stomach complaint. Perhaps an inflammation of the appendix, left undiagnosed? Phoebe, I mean no disrespect to your brother, but these things do…”

“It was not appendicitis,” Benjamin Cole interrupted. He retrieved his incense-burner from the side-table, removed the expired taper and inserted another. “His servants – who were all terrified of him, incidentally – report that, on Wednesday morning, Warner first asked for water. Before his death that night, he was known to consume at least three gallons of it. His sheets were drenched with sweat. Yet, upon examining the body, I found in it all the evidence of dehydration.”

He lit the incense and blew a wreath of smoke toward us meditatively, before turning back to the flickering flames. “Unlikely as it may appear,” he concluded, “what Colonel Frederick Warner died of was thirst.”


	4. Chapter 4

When I came downstairs in the morning, Charles and Cole were already deep in consultation. Through the half-open door, I could see them close together with their heads, auburn and dark brown, bent over a book. There was a tension in Benjamin Cole’s body, a thrill of the hunt, such as I had not noticed since the Feversham investigation; and Charles’s hand was resting casually on his shoulder.

I firmed my step upon the stair, and when I opened the door there were two feet of space clear between them.

“One would learn more, far more, of course,” Cole was saying, “if one could compare it with the other cases. It is a crying shame they have already been buried.”

“Could we not exhume them?” I asked, sitting down to my breakfast. They had left me some toast and eggs, and there was tea still warm in the pot.

Cole gave me a sharp, sidelong glance. “Surely the eminent Dr. Bannister of Mannering Terrace would not approve of such methods.”

“There is no need for him to know,” I said.

I looked up from my toast to find Charles staring at me as though I had gone mad. But all Benjamin Cole said was, “I’m sure resurrectionism is exactly what a man like your brother would expect of a business such as ours. But perhaps it will not come to that. There are still the samples from Warner’s body to examine.” He put down the book with decision. “I shall be in the laboratory.”

“Hadn’t you better get dressed first?” Charles asked mildly.

Cole looked down and plucked at his dressing-gown, frowning. “If you think it necessary,” he said at last, with a note that, in another man, I might have termed petulance.

Once Cole had retreated to his room upstairs, Charles told me, “When he gets involved in a problem like this, he is perfectly capable of working all day in a state not fit to be seen – have you noticed the burns on the sleeves of that wretched dressing-gown? It scares away the clients.”

His voice was fond and abstracted. While I finished my egg, he paced around the sitting-room, picking up objects aimlessly and setting them down again.

“Phoebe,” he said at last, “I hope you are not thinking of becoming involved in this.”

So, he had noticed my earlier use of the first-person plural. The instinct for retreat was strong within me, nearly screaming caution: it had my brother’s voice. Yet I recalled my talk with Meg the previous night. “I know I may not have your and Mr. Cole’s specialized knowledge,” I said, “but I would like to help, if I can. I should at least like to follow along with what you are doing. After all, I have already been involved in one of your cases…”

“And faced a terrible danger,” he said sharply. “Do you think I could bear such a thing again?”

There was real pain in his voice, and I kept mine very gentle for my reply. “But, my dear, there is a great difference between being a victim and being an observer. After all, you and Mr. Cole are not in any danger?”

“Sometimes we are,” he was forced to admit. It had been an advocate’s sort of question.

“And do you think,” I asked, “that that is any easier for _me_ to bear? We’re in this together now, Charles, through well and ill. All I really ask is to be kept informed.” I twisted the teacup between my fingers. “I do not want us to become strangers to each other.”

He was frowning at me thoughtfully. “Do you know,” he said, “as unhappy as Benjamin was when you first agreed to be my wife, he did tell me that you might make a useful addition to our work. I couldn’t imagine what he meant by it then, but now…”

I felt myself flush with pleasure, without quite knowing the cause. “He said that?”

“I suppose he was referring to the shop. It’s true, we do not always have the time we need to devote to it.”

Yet he had not suggested that I work in the shop, not at first. I could not help wondering, then, whether that whole business about the maid had been nothing more than a test for me. It wouldn’t be unlike him.

But I did not say anything to that effect aloud. I was content to merely plant the seed of the idea in Charles’s mind, and see what might grow of it.

He had drifted to the sideboard as he spoke, and was examining something upon it very intently. Finished with my breakfast, I came up to him and laid my head against his shoulder, following his line of sight: there was the old engraving of _Alchymia_ in ancient garb, holding up an alembic, that Charles claimed looked a bit like me. And beside it, a framed silverprint of two young men standing in front of a boat-house in the sunshine.

“That’s Benjamin in his university days,” Charles said, pointing to the figure on the right. Tall, thin, long-faced and dark-haired: when I peered close, he was instantly recognizable in the grainy image. He hunched uncomfortably away from the arm the other man had thrown about his shoulders.

“But I thought he must have gone to Redstone, like you.”

“Oh, no.” I heard a smile in Charles’s voice, oddly proud. “He was a King’s man, on a scholarship.”

“I didn’t realize they had a course in the alchemical sciences.”

“They don’t. He studied the Classics there, and philosophy.” I lifted my head to see that Charles’s smile had widened, noticing my astonishment. “As an alchemist, he is self-taught.”

“He also has excellent ears,” Benjamin Cole noted, coming into the room. “And they are burning at this moment.”

He was dressed, after a fashion, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and waistcoat more befitting a farmer than a gentleman-scientist, but at least he had the sense to spare his good things from the laboratory fires. “Charles, are you coming down with me?”

Charles shook his head – regretfully, I thought. “I need to make a delivery to the Dyers’ Guild and pick up this week’s orders from the hospital.” He smiled. “One day, our business will expand to the point where we can both spend our time shut up in the laboratory, but it is not this day.”

“Alas for that,” Cole said. And then – which might have sounded brusque or dismissive, were it not spoken with unexpected tenderness – he added, “Don’t forget your walking-stick, Charles.”

*

Cole came upstairs again in the afternoon, while I was curled up in Charles’s armchair, reading. The parlour windows faced west and the sun lay in long, golden beams across the floor, illuminating the dust-motes in the air.

Edith had made me a pot of tea and some sandwiches. When she brought them in, I had asked, hardly knowing what prompted me: “Edith, have you heard any talk around town? About anything – oh, anything perhaps unusual?”

“No, ma’am.” She kept her head lowered within her demure cap. “But then I don’t know many people but the baker and the green-grocer, and they do not speak with me overmuch.”

Surely she must be terribly lonely, I thought, but when I tried to prolong the conversation, she only curtsied and went back to the kitchen, leaving me to my book. The clock ticked on toward half-past-four, and a cart clattered past in the street.

“I do not like this,” Cole said abruptly, striding across the room with his hands behind his back. “I do not like it at all.”

He looked pale, his normally tidy hair disordered, a wild light in his eyes. He stopped and poured himself a glass of whisky and drank it down unwatered, which I had never seen him do at such an hour.

“What is the matter?” I risked asking. “Have you had a result?”

For the first time, he seemed to register my presence in the room. “And what are you doing here, Miss Bannister?” he demanded, as though I was part and parcel of his troubles.

I refused to look guilty. “It was very quiet in the shop. I thought that, if someone did call, I would be able to hear the bell from here and come down to meet them.”

“Well, you can’t,” he announced, “for I have muffled it. I cannot bear to have jangling interruptions while I am at my work.”

I stared at him. “Brilliant eccentricity is all very well, but I must say...”

But Cole was already distracted. “Is that some of Charles’s rubbish you’re reading?”

I smoothed down the volume’s cover – it depicted brave soldiers rescuing a maiden from the clutches of savages in the New Carthaginian mountains. “He enjoys them, and so I thought that I might try to do the same. I find that they make the time pass, but…”

“But,” Benjamin Cole interrupted, “they are full of improbable personages who are utterly impervious to danger and doubt, and just as utterly devoid of all true human relations.”

This had in fact been my own opinion, almost to the word, but I was surprised to hear him voice it so decidedly. “Yes. And of course,” I added, “a great many of them are set in the colonies.”

We looked mutely at each other for moment: both aware, I thought, of a dangerous topic having been breached. How could Charles read these books, I’d often wondered, when surely he knew the truth of what the war was like? But perhaps that was why he read them.

Understanding, very briefly, passed between us. Then Cole wheeled away from me, returning to his previous preoccupation. “All the signs,” he muttered under his breath, “point to the introduction of some foreign substance into the body, but I can find no trace of it. Such an invisible poison would be…”

“Do you mean to say the Colonel was poisoned?” I asked, setting down the book. “That perhaps they were all poisoned? And yet the symptoms were so different in each case…”

“But the final outcome was the same.” He was frowning as though on the brink of some revelation, but then shook his head: the thought, whatever it was, had passed.

“I’m sure my brother consulted you with the hope of discovering some hither-to unknown disease that might serve to clear his name. But if there is a possibility of it being murder – perhaps a series of three murders – then surely we ought to inform the authorities.”

“No!” Cole exclaimed, with unexpected vehemence. “I will not have any arm of the Government involved. Not in this.” He sounded, just for an instant, like James refusing the alchemical paper inside the house.

“You think you know the cause of it, then?”

“I have an inkling.” He began to pace again about the room. “A very slight inkling. It is quite possible – indeed, I can only hope – that I am mistaken, that my…feelings in the matter are deceiving me. But I cannot take that chance.”

“Tell me,” I said, rising and approaching him cautiously. “What is it you suspect?”

“Nothing so definite as suspicion. And yet…” Cole shook his head; when he spoke again, his voice was taught as a viol string. “Charles is wrong, you know, in calling me a self-taught alchemist. I had a teacher after I left university, although I do not care to bring up his name.”

I recalled what I had heard at my brother’s dinner table. “Mortimer? The one they call the black magician?”

“The very same.”

“But Charles said that that was only a rumour. He was outraged by it.”

“He would be,” Cole said shortly. “And thus I have never told him of it. It may be ridiculous and redundant to try and shield Charles from the less savoury aspects of my past and nature, and yet I cannot help wishing to do so.”

“You ought to tell him,” I said, though I knew that it was not my place. “He could hardly blame you for it. And if you think it relevant…”

I was certain that Cole would rebuke me for interfering, but he was too lost within himself. “But it can’t be. Not in reason.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Those who call _me_ a black magician behind my back, know nothing of true black magic. Mortimer – he perverted our science and everything of which it is capable. He used it to create poisons and weapons, to take control of another’s will, to try and prolong his own life. I left him, as soon as I realised the full extent of it. And then I learned as much as I could, until I had the means to bring him down. I have always had a talent for…discovery.”

“You say he made poisons,” I pursued, despite the darkness I heard in his words. “Perhaps an invisible poison, which acts differently upon every constitution?”

Again, Cole’s face took on a thoughtful look, and again it passed in favour of present concerns. “But it cannot be him,” he said, with utter certainly. “You have not yet heard what I did to him.”

I did feel afraid then – not of Benjamin Cole but _for_ him, afraid of what questioning him further might do. He seemed to be a man poised on the edge of a chasm, and I did not want to be the one to push him over it.

But he continued without being asked, all the years of silence pouring out at last. “I discovered that he was selling his potions to the New Carthaginians,” he said, “as well as to our own government. I obtained proof of this. And then I informed against him to the Generality, who burned him for a black sorcerer and a traitor. Burned and….Well. There are punishments that, however skilled, our kind can certainly not survive.”

I hardly knew what to say. “So there, you see,” Cole continued brutally. “There is no chance of Francis Mortimer returning from the grave to haunt me. There was not enough of him left to bury – I made sure of that. And I was there in Imperial Square to see it done.”

“But if…” I dared to lay my hand, very lightly, on his arm. He did not seem to notice it. “If it was true, if he had really betrayed the country, then surely you did the right thing. Justice was served. Surely you need not feel such guilt for it, after all these years.”

I was lying – voicing platitudes that another woman, in my place, might have voiced. I still knew him so little that I thought it might be a mercy.

“Justice!” He exclaimed the word as though it were the blackest of curses, looking down at me with burning eyes. “Was it justice that they killed him, for selling to the enemy the same hellish substances they gratefully made use of themselves? Was it justice for the alchemist to be punished, while his paymasters retired to comfortable villas in the country? And was it hunger for _justice_ that made me turn him in, or a salve for my own injured pride?” He shook his head, turning away from me to the fireplace. The set of his shoulders was utterly defeated. “I did think that you, at least, might understand.”

“I do,” I whispered, after a moment. “I’m sorry.” I rested my palm between his shoulder-blades, where the breath rattled his thin frame, and so we remained for some time.

At length he said, with an audible effort, “Tell Charles that I have gone to visit the other victims’ homes. Ask him to join me at Featherstonehaugh’s if he can.”

I nodded mutely. Even after he had gone, I lingered standing in the parlour, with my hands over my face.

Because of course I understood him – better even than he knew. And certainly I understood what it was, to feel guilt for an action one could not have performed otherwise. After all, it had been my fault that the Headmistress had died.


	5. Chapter 5

My parents had never been wealthy but, through economy and the kindness of friends, there was enough money after they died  to provide for me and my brother. James, who had been nearly old enough for university by then, chose to receive a medical education: he longed for a sharp break, from my father’s religion and from our former way of life. I completed my own schooling at Feversham Ladies’ Academy, and afterwards remained there as a teacher.

It was a quiet, retired life. Feversham was set within extensive grounds in the Intmoor countryside, thirty miles from the capital by the old road, and we seldom saw any strangers. At first I only taught grammar and arithmetic to the younger pupils, but in time I became more of a personal secretary to the school’s Headmistress, handling her correspondence and helping her with the business of the school. She approved of me; no doubt, she thought me quiet and sensible and unlikely to ever leave.

Many girls in their twenties may have rebelled at such an existence – may have hungered for more romance and adventure than could be provided by a society of two hundred women, a groundskeeper, and an elderly librarian. But I did not. Perhaps I, like James, wished to leave the past behind me. Perhaps I somehow foresaw that, when romance and adventure did enter into our lives, it would be under the worst of circumstances.

A student went missing. Lucy Davenport – a timid child of twelve, who had nevertheless, in her compositions, displayed a rich and active imagination. Her father was a captain in the merchant fleet, a man without any great funds or influence: there seemed to be no motivation for kidnapping.

Yet as the search went on through the school and the grounds and the nearest villages, it became clear that Lucy had not simply wandered off on one of her meditative walks. We feared she might have fallen into evil hands – there was talk of vagrants and Carthies among the servants, though none had recently been seen in the neighbourhood.

But then there was the other strange thing, which left us not knowing what to think or fear: in the search for Lucy Davenport, vast trails of some slimy substance had been discovered on the school grounds. They were up to three feet in width, and no one could discover what they were, for the slime burned the hands of anyone who touched it.

And so the Headmistress (who was called Laura Sheldon, although I never thought of her by that name) resolved to summon an alchemist. On her dictation, I wrote the letter to 16 Aurelian Street in Haven, an address that as yet meant to nothing to me.

“Cole and Templer have an unconventional reputation,” the Headmistress said to me, with almost her usual briskness, “but at least they will be discreet. I will not bring scandal upon this school if I can help it.”

The letter was sent by express post to the city, and, the very next day, they came. They were much younger than I had expected – I suppose one still has the image of an ancient wizard in mind. But the two of them seemed to be very ordinary gentlemen in their early thirties: one tall, thin, dressed in sober brown; the other auburn-haired with a military bearing, in tweeds and favouring his right leg slightly. They introduced themselves and sat down in the Headmistress’s private sitting-room, waiting for her to give her account.

Even then, I could feel Charles Templer watching me out of the corner of his eye, though I cannot imagine what he saw to merit the examination. Benjamin Cole looked only once toward the corner where I sat, followed by an inquiring glance at the Headmistress.

“Miss Bannister is my confidential secretary,” she said, guessing his meaning. “You may speak before her as before myself.”

The Headmistress laid out the bare facts of the case, and as she spoke, I marvelled once more at her composure. She was about fifty years old, handsome in a stern way, her posture an example for the girls to follow. Indeed, her appearance was somewhat foreign, with the decided black brows over long, dark eyes, the heavy ink-coloured hair streaked with white; yet the severity of her dress and manner was such that no one dared to question it. People admired her as they would a painting or a statue: very few had any glimpses of human warmth beneath, and I knew that I was lucky to count myself among them.

By the time she had finished, Cole was frowning thoughtfully. “You wish for us to find the girl?”

“I wish to know the truth of the matter,” the Headmistress said, in a tone of rebuke. “Of course, we would all be glad to see Miss Davenport safe.”

“You are more likely to get the truth, Mrs. Sheldon,” said Cole.

“Benjamin, surely—”

“We will not be cozened, Mr. Templer,” the Headmistress rapped out. “Not when lives are at stake. Pray continue to be frank, sir.”

Cole gave her a brief nod in acknowledgement. “We shall need to examine the markings you describe. We have brought equipment to analyse them here, without returning to Haven, but we will require a room with a hearth to use as laboratory. As I assume that you have already exhausted all conventional search methods, this phenomenon is our main clue. I don’t suppose anyone saw where she was going last?”

“Lucy was a solitary girl,” I volunteered from my corner. “And it is our exam-time. The other pupils are all occupied with their studies; at least, they were before this tragedy.”

“Very well, then,” he said, getting up in his abrupt way. “Alchemy is our trade and we shall practice it. We’ll inform you if there is anything else we require.”

Belatedly, the rest of us rose also, Templer using the help of a walking-stick.

“You limp, Mr. Templer,” the Headmistress observed.

It was a direct remark bordering on rudeness, when addressed to a grown gentleman and not a schoolgirl, but he replied affably enough: “I served in New Carthage and was wounded there, some years ago.”

“Do you disapprove, Mrs. Sheldon?” Cole asked, with a directness equal to hers.

She returned his look evenly. “I suppose, sir, that my pedigree is common knowledge. It is true that my mother was New Carthaginian; yet I have always sought to be a loyal citizen of the Empire, as far as its people would allow me. Does that make me a suspect in your eyes?”

“I am a scientist, madam,” Cole said. “I suspect nothing I cannot prove.”

*

Having heard that they and their things were safely installed in one of the upper pantry kitchens, I attempted to leave them to it. I had a grammar revision class to teach that afternoon – one of the few that my secretarial duties still left me time for – in which I addressed a subdued group of pupils and had trouble stretching the class to the allotted time. Afterwards, having just returned to my little tower room for tea, I was surprised by a knock at the door.

It was Charles Templer, his pleasant face diffident. “Miss Bannister? I’m sorry to intrude, but Cole and I are in need of a guide, and Mrs. Sheldon said that you might help us.”

“Of course,” I answered, just as glad to have something active to do, rather than sitting alone and thinking about Lucy and what might have become of her. I gathered up my hat and coat and followed him downstairs.

The glimpse I had through the door of the pantry was my first look at an alchemical laboratory. There were bellows set up by the fireplace, a small distilling apparatus over a spirit lamp, glass vessels in various shapes ranged over the worktops. Benjamin Cole was just unpacking the last of them from a hay-lined box, cradling it like a child.

“Benjamin,” Charles said, knocking lightly on the doorframe. “I have brought Miss Bannister. Shall we go?”

Cole looked up. His blue eyes were as piercing as a lancet: I felt that he could see through my clothes, through my flesh, down to my bones. Nodding briskly, he took up a bag which reminded me of my brother’s medical kit and came out to join us, locking the door carefully behind him.

They wished to see the slime-trails first, and so I took them out into the woods where the traces had been found, about  half a mile from the school. It was an overcast day but dry, warm with the promise of summer; in other circumstances, I might have enjoyed the walk.

“Is this the place?” Cole asked. It was just within the shade of the trees –the playing-fields could still be clearly seen behind us – in a spot carpeted with fallen leaves from autumns past. The slime glistened wetly against them.

Cole crouched down beside the trail, pulling on a pair of thick gloves. He took samples and measurements, muttering figures to himself, and occasionally tossing a sharp question in my direction.

“Has it rained here recently?”

“It rained last night. Before that, we had a spell of quite fine weather.”

“Hm!” He got to his feet, looking about the area, and then strode off again toward the fields. Charles shot me an amused glance, by which I understood that this behaviour was typical, and we followed.

“And this?” Cole asked, pointing to the old well at the edge of the meadow.

“It is no longer used: the water leaked into the cellars, I believe. We did…check the bottom. But it had a heavy lid over it, as you see, which Lucy could hardly have shifted.”

“But the lid has been taken off since?”

“By the search party from the village, the day she went missing. Afterward no one in the school could lift it, and we haven’t had time to call someone in.”

He hummed again, and leaned over to look into the well-shaft. “Charles, come look at this.”

Charles leaned down beside him. “The same slime on the walls?”

“Indeed. Careful, don’t touch it.” He took another sample, and straightened. “Shall we attempt to fit this cover back on for the ladies, do you think?”

“Oh, no,” I protested, “you needn’t…”

But they were both already shrugging off their jackets and rolling up their sleeves. “If Benjamin thinks it worthwhile,” Charles said in an aside to me, “then we should probably do it. If we can.”

Somehow they managed it, though it had taken four villagers to get the cover off. Charles was still built like an athlete in spite of his war injury, and Cole displayed a wiry strength I would not have anticipated. In some primitive way, I must admit I was impressed with the display: I even had a foolish wish that Charles might scrape his hand slightly or come into contact with the vicious slime, so that I might bandage it up for him. Of course, the school nurse would have done the job far better.

I was drawn to Charles even then, I think, his cheerfulness and open disposition warming me through like the sun. Cole had his own magnetism, certainly, but it was like that of the Headmistress – a distant star giving light but no warmth. So I believed at the time.

“There,” Cole said, dusting off his hands and collecting his jacket from me. “We’ll see if that has done more good than harm to our case, but at least it’s a chore taken care of.”

“I am sure the Headmistress will be grateful,” I offered.

“Never mind that. We will see the cellars now – you mentioned the school had cellars.”

“Of course.” We returned inside the school and I led them down, carrying a lamp before me. I had never liked the cellars, or been there often – as I explained to the alchemists, it was too damp to keep food, and the storage rooms held only the wine for the teachers’ table.

“You keep ale here as well?” Cole asked, sniffing the air.

“Oh, yes, that too. The servants drink it.”

They examined the entirety of the place – felt the walls and floor, measured the rooms, counted the casks of ale – but though I watched them carefully, I could not understand what they were looking for. At last, Cole nodded his satisfaction.

“Thank you, Miss Bannister, you’ve been most helpful. We shall be in our laboratory: tell Mrs. Sheldon that, with any luck, we will see her this evening with our report.”

*

They were true to their word. I was with the Headmistress, going over examination arrangements, though I believe that neither of our minds was fully on the work: it was a relief when the knock came at last.

“Well, Mr. Cole?” she asked. “You have discovered something?”

“I fear that I have,” he said. His long, angular face was very grave. In the pause that followed, I saw the Headmistress sit forward with her hands folded, as though she was were facing a judicial sentence.

“Out with it,” she burst out finally, foregoing decorum for a moment. “There is no kindness in holding us in suspense. What of poor Lucy?”

Benjamin Cole bowed his head. “You will not see Lucy Davenport again, madam. There is a Worm beneath the school, and I believe she has become its victim.”

I actually feared that the Headmistress might faint, and reached for the smelling salts we kept on hand for overwrought students. I was so concerned for her reaction, in fact, that I nearly missed the import of what Cole was saying: it all sounded like mere nonsense, apart from the fact that Lucy was dead.

But the Headmistress maintained her calm, sitting upright in her chair. “What can you mean by that?” she asked. “What sort of worm?”

“A very large one,” Cole said, a touch dryly. “A creature that resembles the common slug much as the dragons of New Carthage resemble the common lizard. I could not say when it first appeared – such things often hibernate in the winter – but it is now frequenting your cellars and grounds. They are fond of damp places and of beer, as your gardener could tell you.”

“And you think – that it could have…”

“Even the smaller specimens can be carnivorous,” Charles put in. Unlike Cole, he was visibly uncomfortable with the information he was presenting. “In this case….”

“I see,” the Headmistress said. “I don’t suppose you can tell us what we have done to deserve such a – scourge?”

In the midst of my distress, I thought the question merely rhetorical. But Benjamin Cole answered it with another: “Do you teach alchemy at this school?”

“Certainly not.” Conventional wisdom did not consider it an appropriate pursuit for young ladies.

“I ask because sometimes the run-off of alchemical material can cause such uncontrollable changes in the natural world. Alchemy, after all, is the science of change.”

The Headmistress went pale: I thought she must be imagining, as I was, the hideous forms that such a transformation might take. “But we are quite isolated here,” she said, with some attempt at her usual force. “There can be no alchemical material in the vicinity – unless perhaps the girls….But the wardens would never have allowed it.”

“No stills in the dormitories, then,” Benjamin Cole said. “But even so, these things can travel – the creature in its new form can certainly travel fast. One amateur’s carelessness can cause repercussions dozens of miles away. I thought we had seen the end of such rank irresponsibility with the Government licensing laws, at least, but it seems that the amateur puffers will always slip through. I am sorry that you have had to suffer for it.”

“I suppose I should send the girls home.”

“That might be a wise precaution. Most of all, insure that none of them is ever abroad alone.”

“It will be a scandal on the school.” If she had ever lost control of herself for a moment, she now regained it with a vengeance. “But no matter. Is there anything that might be done? Can such things be hunted?”

Cole shook his head. “Not hunted: it would simply retreat underground. But it is only a Slug, after all, though prodigiously large and with its mucus refined to a true venom. I believe that I may be able to create a poison that will kill it.”

“Pour salt on it,” I suggested, with a touch of hysteria. “An entire salt-cellar.”

He turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Something not very distant from that.”

“Then I pray that you will get to work, Mr. Cole,” the Headmistress said sharply. “No effort or funds are to be spared.”

They bowed out of the room, and, very briefly, she hid her face in her manicured hands. Then she lowered them and turned back to me, expressionless.

“Draft a letter for me, Miss Bannister, to be sent to all the pupils’ parents. And then let us continue with the examination schedules.”

“But if they are to be sent home…”

“We must be prepared for every eventuality,” she said, in a voice I could not argue with.

*

Charles Templer came to call on me again the next day, about mid-morning. The school was in chaos: news of the possible dismissal (though not the reason for it) had come out, causing a whirlwind of rumour and speculation. I had retreated to my room for a fortifying cup of tea before returning to face them, when there was a rap on the door.

I opened it with trepidation, changing to a smile when I saw him standing there, ducking his head a little, his hat in hand.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you again,” he said.

“It’s no bother at all. Have you and Mr. Cole made any progress? I hope you haven’t been working all night?”

“We took it in shifts,” he said ruefully. “Benjamin doesn’t mind it, he hardly sleeps in any case. But of course the matter is very urgent. At the moment, we’re needing further quantities ingredients for the preparation, and I had hoped that you’d know where to find them. I did not wish to trouble Mrs. Sheldon…”

His look made it clear that the Headmistress intimidated him, perhaps somewhat more than the giant Worm. “Of course I’ll be glad to help if I can,” I said.

“Our greatest call is for alum and blue vitriol. And as we are unfamiliar with the vicinity…”

“There is a dye-works in the village five miles distant. Will that do?”

“Admirably,” he said.

I snatched up my hat,  wishing to demonstrate all the briskness I had learned from the Headmistress. “Then we shall take the porter’s pony trap and go there at once. I have no duties this afternoon that cannot be postponed.”

“You don’t require a chaperone?” He was smiling as he said it.

“I am hardly a blushing young miss, Mr. Templer. Being daily surrounded by blushing young misses makes me well aware of it.”

“Well, for that matter,” he said, “I am only an old soldier.” And though he did not offer me his arm, we walked side-by-side down the stairs together.

*

There is no use relating the substance of our long conversation, as we rode in the pony trap among the green spring countryside, to the dye-works and back. Amid the events of those dreadful days, the time I spent with Charles stands out as a haven. We talked of books and music and popular philosophy, and though our tastes in each differed, still we found much to agree on. Charles told me stories about his time at Redstone, and several times he made me laugh. I told him, in turn, the brief points of my own biography: that I had a brother, and that my parents had died when I was young.

I did not know many men in my life – certainly not dashing, handsome young men – and yet I felt no discomfort in his company: he had such a way of setting me at ease, of smiling at me as though I was something far more remarkable than I was. I suppose we were drawn together partly because we both felt ourselves to be playing a subordinate role in the greater drama. But there was something else there as well – something real, as I have since discovered.

We parted several hours later, he to his laboratory and I to my garret, trying to keep myself occupied through the day. The next I heard of the two alchemists was late that evening, when the Headmistress summoned me to her study. I had not undressed for bed, perhaps expecting something of the kind – certainly I knew that I could not sleep, so near to the decisive moment.

She was sitting in her straight-backed armchair by the fire, her head propped on one hand. Her hair was loose, as I had never seen it before: when she looked up, I really thought that there was something wild and New Carthaginian in her look.

But the Headmistress spoke very collectedly, as she always did. “Come in, Phoebe. Would you care for a drink?”

“Thank you, no, ma’am. Have you heard anything?”

“The alchemists report that they will have the poison ready tomorrow.”

“Well...surely that is good news?” I said tentatively. “We shall not have to disband the school.”

She shook her head, gazing into the embers of the fire. “Mr. Cole says that he has been studying the creature’s movements, in the time he could spare from his experiments. He tells me that it has been feeding on the rats in the cellar, for lack of better pray. He says that he has had a glimpse of it – that is growing.”

“Dear God.” I shuddered.

“There is more. The Worm enters a state of torpor when it has fed, but this does not last long – the smaller the pray, the briefer the delay, and with its increasing size that period is shrinking. Mr. Cole fears that, by the time the remedy is complete, he will not be able to administer it.”

“Couldn’t we simply lay it down for the Worm to come across?” I was thinking of the treatments I had seen the gardener use, around our lettuce.

“It has developed a modicum of intelligence with its size. It will know to avoid poison.”

“Then what are we to do?”

“I cannot think.” She raked the black-and-silver strands back from her face, and said abruptly, “You were out unchaperoned with Mr. Templer today, Phoebe.”

The change of subject took me so unawares that I blushed and stammered like a schoolgirl. “We were – that is, I was showing him…”

The Headmistress held up a hand. “You are a grown woman and I require no explanations. He is certainly a wiser choice than many a fine gentleman that might have come down from the capital – a man of education, formerly in the army, with a small but steady source of income. If you must marry, you could do far worse.”

“Surely you are thinking rather far in advance of the facts, ma’am,” I said, appalled. “I have known Mr. Templer for a matter of days, and he has given no indication…”

She smiled thinly. “Perhaps – though I have seen the way he looks at you. In any case, I wish you the best of fortune. And I also wish that you will walk out with him again tomorrow, after luncheon.”

It was the formula used for a parlourmaid’s courting of a groomsman, although I did not comment upon it: it was no surprise that she saw me as a dependent, even if an intimate one. What shocked me was the suggestion itself. “You wish…?”

“I can make it an order if you like, Miss Bannister.”

She sounded suddenly very weary. Numbly, I murmured some words of assent and hurried from that firelit room.

*

The next day, I did as she had commanded. When in my life had I ever done otherwise? But my first suspicions had grown over the course of the morning, and the first thing that I said to Charles, once we were walking together in the garden, was a full account of everything that had transpired the previous night between the Headmistress and myself.

His eyes widened in alarm as I concluded. “And you believe she may be planning – some desperate action?”

I risked a look up the sheer wall of the school, to where the window of the Headmistress’s study overlooked the garden. She had a free period at this time, I knew, during which she usually went over her accounts: she generally required me with her. “I think it likely.”

“What shall we do?”

Few people over the age of fourteen ever asked me what to do, but the answer came easily. I felt very composed – I wondered if this was how _she_ always felt. “You will go to the laboratory, please, and warn Mr. Cole.”

“And you?”

I took a deep breath. “The cellars. It’s probably a mere misgiving, but…”

“Of course.” He pressed my hand briefly, and then he was retracing our steps inside the building, nearly running despite his limp. If the Headmistress was watching us from above, she might suspect some crisis was at hand in our putative courtship. If she was not…

I stopped only to take an oil lamp from a cupboard, descending the turnings of the steps so fast that I nearly tripped over my skirts. There was a light there already, flickering against the stone walls, although I knew the students and staff had been forbidden to enter the cellars.

A lamp stood burning in the corridor, but there was no one there: in the echoing silence, I heard footsteps further up ahead. And beside the lamp – I knew at once that it was the alchemists’ preparation, though it was held in an unassuming green-lidded gardener’s bucket. I approached and picked it up very carefully, knowing that it would burn my flesh as surely as the Worm’s slimy venom.

And that was when I saw the Headmistress. She was hurrying down the corridor towards me, holding up her dress – in the lamplight, I saw that her face was flushed with two spots of high colour, her breathing fast.

“Why, Phoebe!” she exclaimed in a tone of ordinary surprise: more at having her plans disrupted than anything else, I believe, for she was not accustomed to being thwarted. “What are you doing here?”

Behind her came the Worm. It was the only glimpse I ever had of it: its swollen, undulating body glistening with poison, the gaping cavity of its open mouth. It moved preternaturally fast for something so large. Then it passed into a shadow, turned a corner, was gone into one of the store-rooms that led off the corridor.

“It is trapped there for now,” the Headmistress cried. “There’s not a moment to be lost. Quick, Phoebe, the solution!”

For a moment, I almost gave it to her, so trained was I to obeying the command in that voice. But I only clasped the bucket tighter to my chest. “You will never escape it in time. Such a creature’s death-throes…”

Her head, with its distinguished profile, went up proudly. “What does that matter, so long as the school is safe? I know the price and I have made my decision, Phoebe. Give me the bucket.”

“I will not!” Dimly, I was aware that I sounded like a petulant child – like the student I had once been.

Another span of breath passed while she simply watched me for signs of wavering. I remember her wide, dark almond-shaped eyes, exotic despite their lack of adornment, and the set of her jaw. Then she looked up at something behind or beyond me.

It was Benjamin Cole. He fetched up by my side, gasping from his precipitous descent down the stairs – Charles with his bad leg must have been far behind him – his pupils distended with more than the darkness, so that that they had an oily sheen.

“I was drugged,” he panted. “What has…?” But he took in the situation at once.

“Sir, you will please instruct my secretary to give me the preparation.”

He took a step toward her, his hands outstretched. “Mrs. Sheldon. There is no need for this. I have been working out methods…”

The Headmistress shook her head. “I cannot possibly risk any more lives.”

Their eyes met, and I knew that neither would willingly give way. Cole said, “And I, madam, cannot allow you to do this.”

“Then you had best be very fast,” said the Headmistress – and she picked up her skirts and ran from us, more rapidly that I had ever thought she could run, down the corridor and into the store-room the Worm had entered.

In the next instant, Benjamin Cole had snatched the bucket from my slackened arms and chased after her, impeded by the load. I thought the lamps guttered, but perhaps it was only my vision that went black.

I heard an unearthly, prolonged scream; and then a hissing like the air escaping from the largest bellows in the world; and the slamming of a door.

I could not recall moving forward, but in the dim light of the distant lamps, I saw the closed door, and Benjamin Cole leaning again it. One of his sleeves was burnt through, the flesh showing red through the gap, but he did not seem to notice it. His drug-dark eyes were hollow.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “But at least the Worm is dead.”

“The Headmistress…?”

He shook his head. “She sacrificed herself to slow it.”

I hardly knew what I did or said then. “Oh, I must go to her!” I cried. “I must – it is all my—”

I tried to rush forward through that door, and only his arms held me back.

*

Some days after the funeral, Charles Templer came to see me. I was sitting in my room, as I had done for some time, staring at the detritus of the past several years – a few books, a few drawings, a few gifts from students, all circumscribed very neatly within the little room’s curving walls – and wondering what on earth I was to do next. With the examinations concluding, I had the summer holiday’s grace from an immediate decision, but sooner or later, one would have to be made. I could not contemplate staying at Feversham, and yet I had nowhere else to go.

Charles was pale under his tan, and I can imagine how I must have looked myself: a white-faced little ghost in mourning black, her hair drawn back tightly. We shook each other’s hands like the survivors of a battle – or how I suppose the survivors of a battle must shake hands. Charles would have known.

He asked me how I was. I said the polite things, and then I told him how Lucy Davenport’s parents had come to the school and learned the truth, and how a team of workman-alchemists had arrived from the capital to remove the desiccated body of the Worm, and how the governors were in dispute about the future of the Feversham, and all the rest of it.

And after I had finished, and dried my face, we talked of other things: the alchemy business, the theatres of Haven; even the latest melodramatic adventure novels, for which Charles betrayed a weakness. He took me out of that room and into the gardens and fields, and told me of plots that had never happened and in which I had never been involved; and slowly some of my grief passed from me, like poison leaving a wound.

Our courtship, which had served as a playing-piece in the Headmistress’s final plan, became a reality in those weeks. I did not question, though perhaps I should have, how he found time to call so often – riding out from Haven and staying in the guest chambers for a night or two at a time – and how Benjamin Cole was able to spare him. I know only that one day, over tea, he rose from his chair to kneel beside me – an incongruous male presence, in that tower room where I had spent the last years of my girlhood – and asked me whether I would agree to be his wife.

Perhaps I should have been expecting it, the first proposal of marriage that I had ever had. My immediate reaction, however, was a shock so pure that it froze me entirely.

“Of course,” Charles was saying, in a quick, alarmed voice, “if you need time to consider – I am aware that the circumstances of our meeting—”

The surprise faded. I knew that, if this were one of the stories he so liked, I ought to have been swept away with passion at his declaration. But in fact I was very cold-blooded: it was as though all my feelings had been scoured clean, leaving nothing behind. I thought about what it would be like to have a home of my own, away from Feversham, and to share it with this man, who was kind and brave and loyal, and with whom I could converse: a better man by far than I deserved.

I took his hands between my gloved ones and looked down into his face. “My dear Mr. Templer,” I said, determined this once to be more truthful than kind, “I know what _I_ am fleeing from. But what about you?”

“I can’t imagine what you mean, Miss Bannister.” Yet that was fear I saw in his eyes, not incomprehension. Of course, he could not tell me: perhaps he had never admitted it to himself, though even a sheltered spinster like me had noticed the signs.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, because his hands were warm even through my black gloves, and I wanted so very much to accept what he was offering me: the promise of love and safety and salvation.

I told him “yes.” And when he drew me close and murmured “Thank God” into my tightly-pinned hair, even I, who had lost all faith long ago, found that my heart had room to share in his gratitude.


	6. Chapter 6

In the parlour of 16 Aurelian Street, Benjamin Cole threw down his newspaper. His face was pinched and I could tell that he had spent a sleepless night, which seemed to have frayed his temper, but brought him no nearer to a solution. He was short with Edith when she arrived with our breakfast, and no more communicative with us while we ate, his head hidden behind copies of the morning _Post_ and _Courant_.

“Anything in the papers?” Charles asked, perhaps intending to draw him out.

Cole’s voice was clipped as gunfire when he answered: “Apart from the fact that our armies are now attempting to besiege the Walled City of New Carthage into starvation, none.”

Charles shuddered: I saw that his hand rested instinctively upon his right thigh, where he had been injured during the first battle of the Walled City. “Perhaps it will finally mean the end of this bloody war. So many thousands killed already…”

“There will shortly be thousands more,” Cole interrupted, “even if they are New Carthaginian. Tell me, if they are reduced to eating each other, shall we use it as further proof of their barbarism?”

I saw that it was an old argument between them, concealed and papered-over, but no less bitter for that. “If you had been there,” Charles said, “you would need no further proof.”

Cole raised his eyebrows sardonically. “And what of our own army? Can a war be fought with barbarism on only one side?”

Charles flushed in uneven, angry patches. “And the dragons?” He turned to me, as though appealing for witness. “It is a king of flying lizard they use for combat, from which they drop alchemical explosives on our heads. Stuff to burn the flesh off a man living. I still wake in the night to the sound of their wings.”

He did, I knew that he did: it was all I could do then to hold him until his heartbeat slowed. I bit my lip for a moment, conflicting ideals warring within me: if it had been later in the day, perhaps I might not have spoken at all.

“And yet,” I ventured finally, “one can hardly fault a people who wish to claim back their own country, rather than be colonised by strangers from beyond the sea. Surely history has shown us that. We may believe our civilisation to be superior, but that does not give us the right…”

“Ah yes, the benefits of our superior civilisation,” Benjamin Cole sneered, allowing me to fade back anxiously into my chair. “Nothing at all to do with their superior ports or their silver mines or their advanced alchemical science. And those fire-breathing dragons would not come in useful at all.”

“They do not _breathe_ fire.” Charles was clearly struggling for calm, hands white-knuckled around his knife and fork. “Of course I cannot answer for the sentiments of the Generality. But as for myself – as for the other men who were there with me – there was no reward in it for us but bullets and fire, and I never saw a single man falter. We may have been conscripted, but we all believed that we were doing a fine thing.”

“So does many a criminal,” Cole replied.

Charles’s fork clattered down against his plate. He said nothing, but Cole, sitting across from him, could see his face better than I could. He went pale and said swiftly, “Not you, Charles, I did not mean you…”

“Oh, did you not?”

In the charged silence, I could hear the tea-cups rattle from the passing of a carriage in the street. Then Benjamin rose from his chair and came to kneel before him. “Forgive me,” he said. He was tall enough that his eyes were on a level with Charles’s where he sat. I don’t believe that either of them was aware of me just then, though I sat barely a foot away. “I was speaking generally and neglected the specific. An unconscionable lapse. Do say that you forgive me.”

Only Benjamin Cole, I thought, could issue an apology that sounded so much like a command. But for Charles it seemed to be sufficient: his face softened and he placed a hand on Cole’s shoulder. “I could forgive you anything,” he said.

For a moment, they only looked at each other. When Benjamin spoke again, it was so quietly that I barely heard him. “I can only pray,” he breathed, “that that is true.”

*

The day passed tensely. Cole was closeted in his laboratory, performing one of his many-staged distillations: around noon, I heard an alembic burst (no uncommon event) followed by several loud curses. Charles winced, from the workbench in the back of the shop where he prepared the more routine orders, while I kept my head bowed over the ledger.

But I had difficulty holding my mind to the figures. I kept glancing up to look at the dun-coloured houses of Aurelian Street – the secondhand bookshop across the road, the greengrocer’s at the corner – with their upper-story windows shuttered against the dull, grey day. Scattered thoughts occurred to me, but none more revelatory than those blank, shut-up windows. My ears filled with a sound like that of the sea.

When I had been only a girl, my mother had taken me with her to the quarterly Traders’ Fair in the capital. This was before the rebellion in New Carthage, before the most recent wave of fighting had broken out and before the blockade, and the market was filled with a riot of foreign smells and colours.

My mother stopped before a stall of fabrics, and I stood gaping up at it. Recalling it later, I knew that they must have been only conventional silks – anything else would have been sold in a far more exclusive venue – but at the time it seemed to me that all this shifting, flowing brightness could be nothing but alchemy. I hardly noticed as my mother and the trader exchanged something – papers, I think, bound up in packets.

“And what would the young miss like?” the stall-keeper leaned over to ask me suddenly.

A shy child, I shrank back. The man had a full black beard, such as I had never seen before, oiled into stiff ringlets; and his teeth seemed very white within it, grinning down at me.

My mother put her hand on my shoulder, which gave me courage. “Is your cloth magic?” I asked.

“Why, of a surety. Over beyond the sea, young lady, we keep an army of enchanted worms who weave it all at our command.”

“I’ll explain to you later how silk is made, Phoebe,” my mother said. “Sir, you must not fill her head with notions.”

“Phoebe…” He smiled again, but close-lipped within his beard. “Now that is a pretty name, but dangerous. For you, it is only a story, but for my people, she is the goddess of the moon and sea and tides, one of the eldest gods.”

My mother’s hand tightened on my shoulder, nearly painful. “Please, sir,” she said. “We risk a great deal already.”

“But of course.” There was something odd now about his smile. “Little girl, can you tell me the name of this fair city?”

“Haven,” I answered readily: I enjoyed questions of fact. “Because of its artificial harbour.”

“Ah, yes,” the New Carthaginian had said, looking directly at my mother. “But a haven for whom?”

*

I spoke to Cole only once that day, when I was upstairs lingering over my luncheon with the morning’s newspapers open before me. He walked in, took a sandwich from the table, and stood staring down at me for a moment.

“You do not share Charles’s sentiments in these matters,” he said finally. “I have observed this before. Why will you not voice your opinions more clearly, where you have a chance of doing some good?”

He might as well have asked me why I did not go to church, and me a parson’s daughter. “Mr. Cole,” I said stiffly, “I could hardly agree with you above my own husband.”

He grimaced, taking a step away from me. “And what of the integrity of your convictions?”

“I love Charles, and I would not hurt him. Isn’t there some integrity in that?” The question came out pleading – I suppose in some way I sought his approval – but he seemed to take it as a reproof. He went out of the room without a further word to me.

James stopped by in the afternoon, looking harried and nervous – it seemed that Cole had been sending him messages. With the door left ajar, I could just hear the two of them talking in the laboratory: Cole’s clipped, brusque questions more distinct than James’s replies.

“Only the New Town doctors?”

“I could hardly be expected to associate with…”

“But this is no good to me at all! How can we know if this epidemic affects all levels of society if you will not even…”

“An epidemic, Mr. Cole! Surely we have not yet…”

At last, Cole dismissed him. James pressed my hand on leaving, and conveyed his and Meg’s love with rather more emphasis than usual: I could see that he was concerned for me, through whether it was due to the threat of illness or the strain of living in Cole’s household, I could not say.

Cole emerged from his laboratory just long enough to relate the new information to Charles. “His fellow society doctors have admitted to a few more cases with similar symptoms – if they could be called similar, except in their inexplicability – though they have tried to assign them to more mundane causes. Everyone is for hushing up the matter to protect their business – to give him credit, Bannister has not tried to do that.”

“Do you think it might be spreading?” Charles asked quietly.

“I do not know what to think,” Cole said, and the laboratory door shut again behind him.

*

When Charles turned to me that night, I was not sleeping. I could tell that the morning’s dispute, together with the day’s silence, was still weighing upon him: despite the volatility of Cole’s temper, they did not often argue in earnest.

“Sometimes I dread the arrival of the papers,” he said in the darkness. I felt that I was being allowed, midstream, into a conversation he had been conducting with himself, and I ought to have been grateful for that trust. “As the war escalates, his views only seem to become more decided. I fear he may do himself an injury.”

I propped my head up on my elbow, watching Charles’s outline by the faint light that seeped through the shutter. “But how could he do that?” I asked, my heart beating hard. “Surely it is not yet a crime to oppose the government’s decisions?”

He sighed heavily. “If it were only a philosophical stand for him, there would be no question – and I could bear it all the more easily. But it is more than that….He turns away customers, Phoebe, which men in our position can hardly afford to do. He says he will not sell to any member of the Generality; nor to anyone who he suspects of working for them.”

And I thought I knew at least one reason why, after what Cole had told me about his association with Mortimer and its end. It pained me to think of keeping such a secret from Charles, and a secret about his closest friend; I could only hope that Benjamin would consider my suggestion to tell him of it. Yet who was I, after all, to have made the suggestion at all?

“There are times,” Charles went on, staring up at the ceiling, “when he says that he wishes he could go to New Carthage, to learn from the master alchemists there. That, if given the choice, he would rather live and practice in the Walled City than in Haven. It is treasonous talk.”

“But such hunger for knowledge must be natural,” I said, keeping my voice as light and even as I could, “especially among your profession? Everyone knows New Carthage makes up in alchemy what it lacks in material technologies.  I’m sure no one would think to prosecute him on that score.”

I wondered, however, whether what Benjamin Cole dreamed of finding in New Carthage was not solely knowledge, but rather a chance to be what he was without incurring universal disapproval – without concealment and without citizens making warding signs at him in the streets. One heard that New Carthaginian society was very different from ours – stricter in some respects, more liberal in others. But I did not think that he was likely to find his paradise there, even in the magical land beyond the sea, and I suspected that he knew it.

Charles rolled to his side, the bedsprings creaking softly. His voice was all the more anguished for being hushed. “But what about me? What must he think of me, a former soldier and a patriot, if he holds such views? It had always been the – the greatest wedge between us. And now, to find that you agree with him!”

Even his kind heart, then, had not forgotten that. “You knew about my father’s politics,” I whispered. I had confessed it to him some time before our wedding, unable (whatever James might have advised) to keep such a secret from the man I intended to marry. “You knew that he was a Free-thinker, and that the Free-thinkers oppose the war.”

“Your late father, of course…”

“But principles acceptable in a dead man are unbecoming in a living woman?” I let out a breath, worrying at the edge of the coverlet. “They raised me in their faith, Charles; unlike my brother, I did not immediately reject it. But then they died, and I—” I swallowed with difficulty. “After that I tried very hard to forget and to be silent, to be _respectable_. I don’t stand out in a crowd like Edith, or like the Headmistress: I can afford silence very easily.” And I shall try to keep it, I resolved. For your sake.

“Phoebe…” Charles began. But what could he say – what could either of us say? We lived in the world we had been born into, with its history and its sins. It was in this narrow bed with us.

I kissed him, held him, rested my cheek where I could feel the living rise and fall of his chest. “I do not blame you, dearest. And I am sure, whatever Mr. Cole thinks of the war and the Generality – it is nothing at all to do with the love he has for you.”

If our positions had been reversed, he might have heard the hitch in my throat, as I gave voice at last to the other thing that was choking me. Yet Charles did not seem to notice.

“But do you really think,” he whispered in the darkness, “that the war is a criminal thing? That I am a criminal for having fought in it?”

“You are my hero, Charles,” I said. I did not care at that moment how much I sounded like a lady in one of his books. “I may disagree with the Generals’ purpose in subjugating those people, but you will always be a hero to me. I know you have only done what you thought right.”

And it was true – even if, somewhere deep and hidden, I thought that I might have admired him more for conscientiously abstaining from the army, whatever the consequences. He would not have been the Charles I loved, without New Carthage behind him. That was the pain and the paradox of it, which I could never explain to him.

And yet, before we turned to each other to banish all other words and thought for a while, the treacherous idea occurred to me – that Benjamin Cole would have understood.

*

That night I dreamed that I had seen the Headmistress’s body lying on the floor of the cellars, covered in blood. It flowed and flowed, and when I tried to staunch it, it came away as a fine fabric in my hands, changing colour every moment from purple to crimson to deepest scarlet.


	7. Chapter 7

I did not wake until late in the morning, feeling as though my head were stuffed with cotton wool, and by the time I muddled through washing and dressing and came downstairs, I saw that Charles and Cole had already had another serious discussion.

Charles sat in his armchair, looking pale and shocked: despite the time of day, there was a tumbler of brandy by his elbow. It was immediately apparent that Cole had listened to me – that he had told Charles the story of his association with Mortimer, and the man’s execution, and all the rest of it.

Benjamin met my eyes for just a moment as I came in, his face inscrutable. Then he turned back to Charles. “It had to come out sometime,” he said, and I could hear the effort of calm in his voice, “and it seems particularly pertinent at this juncture.”

Charles looked up at him blankly. “I knew there were great hidden depths to you, my dear fellow, but I never imagined…! Oh, Benjamin, you might have told me.”

“And lose the pleasure of hearing you constantly defending my good name?” The words were heavily tinged with self-loathing. “By the time our association came to require such confidences, I feared too much that you might despise me.”

“Despise you!” Charles sat forward, the shock displaced by indignation. “How could I despise you? You did the honourable thing, as soon as you discovered his true nature.”

“Did I?” Cole sneered.

“I can see that it was difficult for you, to turn against a former master. But you did it, to serve King and country…”

Poor Charles, I thought, remembering his anguish of the previous night: of course he would turn this betrayal into Cole’s great patriotic act, in order to find some way at last of reconciling their values. And poor Benjamin, to meet such incomprehension in Charles’s conventional model of morality. Surely, I thought, there must be some way that I could draw them together...

Cole’s earlier agitation had passed: he stood very still by the sideboard, not looking at either of us, and that stillness caused Charles to trail off. “If I had acted solely against the perversion of my art,” Cole said, in a detached tone, “perhaps there would have been some honour in that. But I did not. I grew to feel, you see, that Francis Mortimer did not...value my worth as he ought to have done. And so I turned on him. In my youth and my...innocence, I did not think the consequence would be so dire.”

This time Charles showed no surprise or denial or indignation. He rose from his chair, approached Benjamin, and rested a hand on his arm: when he spoke his voice was as gentle as Meg’s could be when addressing her children, but firm with conviction. “You must not think so ill of yourself,” he said. “I will not allow it.”

I saw, then, how they had lived for three years together as they had, despite all the differences in their backgrounds, temperaments, and opinions. I should have felt like the worst sort of intruder in the face of that bond, yet somehow I did not – although I did turn away to pour myself the dregs from the teapot.

“The upshot of it all in the present case, however,” Cole said after a moment, with something like his usual manner, “is that this connection – which may exist only in my own mind, of course – is thus far the only lead we have. None of my tests have proved conclusive.”

“But how could we pursue it?” Charles asked. “Mortimer is dead, and all of his work will have been confiscated by the Generality.”

“Indeed.” He frowned darkly. “There remains one man, apart from myself, who has worked in Mortimer’s laboratory. His name is Haywood: a puffer of the lowest order, who served as a menial assistant to us. After Mortimer was arrested…I was cleared, of course, for my role in bringing him to justice. They put some questions to me, but I was permitted not to answer them.” Still bitterness there, as black as the over-steeped tea, though without such anguish as before: it had become a factual matter. “Haywood was collected along with the rest of the laboratory materials,” Cole went on. “I thought that would be the last anyone heard of him, for good or ill, but it seems that a few months ago he was dismissed. He had become addicted to somnifer, and I suppose could no longer be trusted among the equipment.”

“I am surprised they let him go,” Charles said. I could not but agree, though it was strange to hear him express such a cynical thought.

Cole acknowledged this with a wave of his hand, occupied with rearranging the objects on the sideboard. “Somnifer is a hard master, as you know. A man in an advanced stage of addiction becomes effectively mad: not much for the Generality to fear.”

“But you think this Haywood could help us?” I asked.

“Possibly. It would require venturing to the kinds of places he is now likely to frequent: the somnifer dens of the Dockside.”

Charles looked at him in silence for an unaccountably long moment, then nodded sharply.

“We will go in the evening,” Cole said. “Such places are busier at night, which will make our quarry harder to find, but also cover our own tracks. Perhaps it is over-caution on my part, but I do not wish us to be seen questioning him. In the meantime, I shall go and make some preliminary enquiries—”

“No,” Charles said. Both Cole and I turned to him, startled: he sounded as though he were commanding a regiment. “We will go to the docks together or not at all. You can make your enquiries tonight.”

Benjamin gave him a sardonic little bow, his eyes hooded. “As you wish.”

But Charles’s words had also given me the seed for my own rebellion. “I wish to come, too,” I said.

“Out of the question, Miss Bannister,” he rapped out.

“Why is it out of the question? I am part of your household and I have been following this investigation. I am concerned with its outcome. And I shall be perfectly safe, with two gentlemen escorting me. Perhaps I might even be of service – I could wear men’s dress if it would—”

“Pray do not be ridiculous,” Cole said. “You have no place inside a drug-taker’s den, with or without an amateur disguise. If you truly wish to make yourself useful, you will stay here and mind the shop while we’re gone.”

I was prepared to stand my ground, but rescue came from an unexpected quarter. “Let Phoebe come,” Charles said.

“Then _you_ stay in the shop,” Cole retorted acidly.

“What, in the evening? Besides, you know that she is right. We are in this together, all of us.”

“I know no such thing,” he said. “But as I can see that I have a mutiny on my hands….We leave an hour after dark. Miss Bannister, wear something you can walk in, but let us not be theatrical. You have been reading too many of those dreadful books.”

*

Charles had a lonely dinner of it that night. Benjamin Cole was in his laboratory, engaged in work on the Speculum – an extremely difficult (in fact, Charles informed me, theoretically impossible) project with which he exercised his mind when there was nothing else to hand.

As for myself, I found that I could eat no more than some slices of bread with a cup of strong tea: I kept him company in the parlour, but the fish that Edith had bought at the market that day went to Charles’s plate alone. No disturbance ever affected his appetite: I suppose the army had trained him to that.

“My dear,” I began, fiddling with the ornaments on the mantelpiece until I remembered that this was one of Cole’s habits. “Of course I’m very grateful. But to be frank, I didn’t think that you would be in favour of my accompanying you tonight.”

He gave me a faint, wry smile. “Too chivalrous by far? I won’t deny the idea of it disquiets me, though I ought to know jhow capable you are. But I had my reasons.” He put down his cutlery with care, motioning me to come and sit beside him. “There is something you don’t know about Benjamin. Something he would not wish you to know, but under the circumstances, I feel that I must tell you. So you will be prepared, in case…”

His hair was tousled from pulling on a heavy jumper, and I smoothed it for him. “What is it?”

“When I first came to live and work with Benjamin, three and half years ago... He was in a bad state. You have heard what his reputation was. And his business was flagging: he left commissions unfinished, threw himself into impossible experiments like the Speculum. And when they failed…”

Charles bent his head toward me and lowered his voice. “He was a somnifer addict, Phoebe. One of the most aggravated cases that ever I saw, and there was a great deal of it in New Carthage.”

“Dear God,” I whispered. To imagine Cole under the influence of such a drug – all that temper and energy without the power of his mind to restrain them…

“He believed he could control it. It took me weeks to convince him that he could not – months to wean him off it. He is grateful to me now, but at the time – Well. The point is that I would do a great deal to prevent him from walking into a somnifer den tonight. And if I cannot do that, then at least I should like as many friends around him as possible.”

“Of course.” I squeezed his shoulder. “I promise I’ll keep a look out.”

“But not so he can tell, I beg you.”

I thought of how appalled Benjamin would be, to find us discussing him in such a fashion. He hated to admit he needed anything – that was surely why his admission that morning had so galled him. “No indeed.”

We finished the rest of that aborted meal in silence, though we sat close together – as though drawing our ranks against some unseen enemy in the falling dark.

*

It was another misty night, the sea-fog having rolled in with the dusk. Each end of the street disappeared into the haze, interrupted only by the smears of the street-lamps: I felt we might have been explorers, the only ones abroad in the ruins of a dead city.

I glanced over at Charles and Benjamin beside me. Wearing soft hats and jumpers under their jackets, they did not exactly resemble dockhands, but at least they would not look too out of place. I had already thought of what character I might plausibly assume in a somnifer den: a lady of the night, a worried wife searching for her husband. My attire – stout walking boots, a wool skirt falling to mid-calf – was undoubtedly more suited to the latter.

“How are you, Charles?” Cole asked softly. That sort of weather was usually wretched for his leg, though on this night it did not seem to trouble him.

“At your disposal, my dear fellow,” he said.

We set off on foot in the direction of the Dockside: a carriage in that neighbourhood would have only attracted undue attention. Toward the centre of town, the streets became brighter with phlogiston light and busier with noisy, well-dressed crowds entering and emerging from the theatres, restaurants and gentlemen’s clubs. In our dark clothes, we were nearly invisible among them. From the government buildings to the north, I heard the great clock strike eight times.

As we continued through the city, the crowds thinned and the streets grew narrower once more: we had reached the old port, which had become conjoined to the metropolis.

I had not been there before, and the roughness and misery of it shocked me. Ragged women hailed my companions as we passed, and taverns disgorged obscenely drunken men onto the pavements. I was glad that I had asked to come, if only to see this obverse side of the New Town respectability in which my brother lived: despite the intrusion of Worms and alchemy and politics, my life had been a sheltered one. I wondered for a moment whether my father – so intent on ministering to the oppressed and colonised – had ever preached among these noisome wynds and closes.

The somnifer dens were clustered in the worst part of the Dockside, just back from the water: I suppose so that the sailors would not have far to go in search of oblivion. There was an alleyway that seemed to consist of nothing but such establishments, together with a few that provided a different form of release.

Benjamin Cole stopped at the corner and sniffed the air. All I could smell was fish and refuse and cheap perfume, but he gave a sigh and bowed his head briefly. “There it is,” he said in an undertone. “The one New Carthaginian export that always manages to pass the blockade.”

Charles tensed beside me, but that was the only comment Cole made: I looked up into his face and saw abstraction there, but none of the longing I had expected and feared.

“There are more luxurious places,” he added. “But Haywood will be running low on funds, and so I think the Seven Sleepers’ Lane here more likely. We shall simply have to try them all until we find him, or someone who has heard of him. Perhaps it might be wise to split into two parties.”

“Certainly not,” said Charles.

Cole levelled a sardonic glance at him. “Or perhaps not. I shudder to think what might become of you two innocents, in such a vale of inequity.”

“You shall have to protect us,” I said gravely, squinting at the house-fronts. “Should we attempt the Lotus Blossom first, or the Tiger’s Eye?”

But in the end, we had to visit them both, and several more beside. They were dark, smoky holes, each one reached by descending a flight of steps. Hangings and cushions gave a thin veneer of Western luxury among the squalor; in the near-darkness, I could make out the glowing dots of coals where shadowy figures slumped in corners with their pipes, murmuring senselessly to themselves. The scent of somnifer was cloying in my throat: I wondered by what iron effort of will Benjamin Cole could bear it.

As we passed from den to den, I noticed that, while the men who ran them affected foreign accents and robes of Occidental style, neither they nor their clients had a truly New Carthaginian look about them. I wondered whether that might be an effect of the blockade.

My mind was drifting, growing dim: despite the alley’s reek, I swallowed welcome draughts of the cool night air each time we emerged outside. The smoke remained longer and longer in my lungs, coating them with its poisonous sweetness.

At last Cole drew us aside and murmured, “They say there is a red-haired man who frequents the Golden Dragon, at the end of the lane. It is among the worst and cheapest of these dens. Are you sure that you would not rather…”

But he stopped to cough himself, and Charles thumped him on the back. “We’re with you. Are _you_ all right?” It was not a casual question.

Benjamin lowered his hand to look at him, his eyes red-rimmed from the smoke and damp from coughing. “I assure you, Charles, I feel nothing but revulsion. To think of wasting away in such a fetid hole…”

“And wasting away genteelly in your own sitting-room, with your high-grade supply?” Charles asked pointedly.

“Does not appeal either. My sitting-room is over-populated enough, these days, without fever dreams invading it.”

Throughout this exchange, I tried my best to appear as though I hadn’t the least idea what they were talking about. I do not think that Benjamin Cole was convinced.

“Why do they take it?” I could not help asking. “All those men? To spend their money in such degraded conditions…”

“It makes them see visions,” Cole said. “The more powerless they feel in reality, the more promise the somnifer holds.”

We proceeded to the Golden Dragon. Despite the high-flown name, it was, as Cole had said, a terrible place: a basement with an earthen floor and no windows, an equally squalid brothel above. It was crowded, perhaps because of its low cost: the smokers lay on pallets scattered about the room, attended by a stooped proprietor who, despite his outlandish dress, addressed them all in the brusque Haven vernacular. A small brazier in the corner provided the only illumination.

We moved toward it, forced to step over the prostrated bodies. I looked down at them in mingled disgust and pity as we passed: I could only hope that their drug had sent them to a better place than this.

A man sat crouched over the brazier, wrapped in a heavy coat; yet despite that, and the airless warmth of the basement, he was shivering as though chilled. Benjamin touched his shoulder and he turned to us, his face a rictus of terror. By the fitful light of the coals, I saw his watery light eyes and the matted clumps of his ginger hair.

“Michael Haywood,” Cole said, crouching down beside him. He spoke gently but firmly, keeping his hand on the other man’s shoulder when he tried to twist away. “Do not be frightened: it is only me. Do you remember?”

“Mr. Cole, sir?” Haywood asked tentatively, after a moment.

“Yes. Now you must listen to me. I know the Generality has been doing something with the research they took from Mortimer. You must tell me what that is.”

In response, Haywood gave a strangled little scream, which was more awful than any bellow. With a final effort, he wrenched away from Cole’s hold and retreated into the corner, pulling his knees up to his chest. The coals cast strange shadows over his face, making him resemble the death’s head in our shop window.

Cole frowned down at the man, and then something seemed to come over him: he drew himself up, tossed back his head and said, in a tone of such command as I had never heard from him: “Haywood! _Speak to me_.”

The man scrambled farther backwards, trying to dig himself into the wall: he looked like one who had seen a ghost. “Oh, Mr. Mortimer…I didn’t mean…”

“I will not tolerate this gibbering. Tell me what has happened at once.”

Michael Haywood stretched out his shaking, dirt-blackened hand; he grasped the front of Cole’s jacket and tugged him forward, as though to confide in him. Charles and I stepped closer, but even so, we could barely make out what Haywood whispered into his ear.

“It is all over, Mr. Mortimer. The small work and the great. The young crows returned but we beat them back. The serpents…”

The last strength seemed to leave him: his eyes grew dim and closed, and he sank against the wall. Yet, halfway back into his fevered fantasy, he murmured with a sudden urgency, “ _The ruddy man has wed the White Lady_.”

Cole sat back. Carefully, he unfolded Haywood’s fingers from his jacket and dropped a few coins into his outflung hand, closing the grubby fist to hide them. “We had better go outside,” he said.

We followed him back through the den and up the unsteady stairs. I felt the reaction strong upon me: the weariness of the past few hours, the disappointment of not having learned anything of value from our only clue. Yet once we out in the cleaner air, Benjamin Cole seemed to vibrate with suppressed energy. His eyes were bright as he faced Charles.

“Dear God!” he exclaimed. “I am beginning to understand.”

“Then you do more than I, my dear fellow,” Charles said ruefully. “The man was clearly raving. The drug…”

Cole turned on him in a sudden passion. “Oh, damn Redstone and all its modern innovations! Do you truly mean to tell me that you know so little of the very foundations of our art?”

Charles was about to answer him, when abruptly his face turned very pale beneath the tan. Before either of us could move to help him, he had crumpled down onto the dirty pavement, like a man who had received a mortal blow.


	8. Chapter 8

Between us, Cole and I managed to support Charles to the nearest street-corner where we might find a carriage back to Aurelian Street. Charles was in too much pain for speech, but we were able to determine that it not his leg or the somnifer smoke that ailed him.

“Then what has happened?” I asked aloud, feeling close to panic, as we jolted over the old cobbled streets in a hansom cab.

“Did you both eat the same dinner?”

“I hardly ate at all. Edith served us fish. But surely this is rather extreme…”

“I’m not so sure,” he said darkly. “As soon as we arrive, I’ll knock up the maid and send a messenger to fetch your brother.”

“He has a sheet of your alchemical paper. I could… But he will never have it on him,” I caught myself up, cursing James and his stubbornness. “He won’t notice the reaction.”

“It is a flaw in the design,” Cole agreed. “I should have caused it to leap upward and burst into flames whenever it is used, thus alerting everybody in the vicinity.”

His asperity had the effect of smelling salts: I straightened, beating back hysteria, and reached over to loosen Charles’s collar and wipe away the cold sweat on his face. We arrived at Aurelian Street sooner than I had thought possible, and I saw Cole slip the cab driver thrice over than the usual fare.

He half-carried Charles into the house, his usually nervous movements as smooth and gentle as when he was carrying out some delicate scientific operation, while I ran to send the grocer’s boy for James. Having done so, I stood for a moment in the middle of the empty, lamp-lit street, battling my great sense of unreality: it seemed too quiet a night for anything terrible to have happened. I had felt the same way in Feversham that summer, in the days after the Headmistress’s funeral.

But now I had to go help Charles, who was, God willing, not beyond it, and that knowledge sustained me. When I got inside, they were all upstairs already: Charles on the sofa, with Edith (awake and hastily wrapped in her robe) bending over him, and Cole pacing impatiently about the room.

I sat on the sofa arm and stroked back my husband’s damp auburn hair: he was very warm. His eyes moved under their lids, as though he were dreaming – was it truly not the somnifer? – and sometimes he would give a moan of pain that tore at my heart. Beside me, Edith clenched her hands together, praying in her native language under her breath. I was glad for it at that moment, having no prayers of my own to spare.

“Will he be all right?” I asked Benjamin – attempting to speak calmly, for I wanted an honest answer.

He did not pause in his restless peregrination. “If I act quickly enough.”

“You think you know the cause, then?”

“I have a grave suspicion, after what Haywood told me tonight. Oh, it’s a hell of a coincidence...Unless, of course…” He stopped and raked his hair back viciously. “But it does not signify. I shall need to go there, at once. I hate to leave him—”

“James will be here soon,” I assured him – tried to assure myself. “Though, if it’s as you say and Charles has the same ailment as those people who died, I am not sure how far my brother will be able to help him.”

Cole looked at me sharply: was he so surprised at my ability to draw a simple inference? “They were all ill for days. Perhaps we have some time. Once Bannister comes, tell him…”

But I had made up my mind already, though I did not relish another clash with Cole at such a time. “If there is somewhere you need to go, I will come with you.”

“Hadn’t you better stay here to look after Charles?” he said, in a tight voice clearly striving for equilibrium.

“James and Edith can look after Charles,” I answered, rising to join him in the corner and speaking quietly enough for the distressed maid not to overhear. “And if you think that I’ll sit here mopping his brow while he suffers – while he dies – when I could be out doing something to save him….I will be _damned_ , sir, if I shall do that.” I was suddenly very angry: not at Benjamin, but at my own impotence. “And I know that you feel the same way, so there is no point in arguing over it.”

Cole reached over and poured me a brandy, but I set it aside: I remembered the Headmistress’s stratagem, and knew that so did he. In any case, I did not think any amount of spirits would suffice.

“Very well,” he said abruptly. “Then we must leave at once.”

I heard Charles stir on the sofa, waking. In an instant, Benjamin was kneeling beside him, taking his hand to measure the pulse at the wrist. “It is not elevated. How do you feel?”

Charles’s eyes opened, and the corner of his mouth tilted up toward a smile. “Utterly wretched, I’m afraid. As though I have been set on fire. And the pain…”

“Like Featherstonehaugh, the banker,” I realised. “Should we try to cool him down?”

Cole shook his head: I could see his own mind working feverishly. “No, no: on the contrary. The fever is the loss of vital heat: we must try to replenish it. Blankets, Miss Vogel! Have you such a thing as a mustard plaster? Well, never mind, Dr. Bannister will.”

Edith rushed upstairs at once; we swaddled Charles in blankets, despite his protests, and put more wood on the fire. As soon as she returned, the maid was despatched to the kitchen to make tea on Cole’s orders: the patient was to drink as much warm fluid as he could.

“If the alchemy trade fails you,” Charles murmured, “you should go in for a hospital matron.”

“Lie still,” Benjamin admonished him. “We must go now and find a cure for you. Bannister will be here soon: you are on no account to let him bleed you. Tell him to remember his theory of humours.”

Charles tried to nod. “You are going…together? You and Phoebe?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good…” I could see that he was extremely weary, but he made an effort to speak. “The alchemical paper…If you are in trouble…”

Cole looked stricken. “I cannot. If it is found on me – I cannot allow any of my work, however insignificant, to fall into their hands.”

Charles was drifting from us, his eyes closing once more. I leaned down and kissed him, hands on his burning cheeks, and then stood up and turned away so that I could wipe the tears from my own face.

When I had composed myself, I saw Cole emerging from the kitchen where he had been giving final instructions to Edith. “You’re ready?” he asked.

“I am,” I said, though it was a far thing from the truth.

*

We headed west again, toward the sea, walking quickly and for a long time in silence. I had difficulty keeping up with Cole’s strides, but when I asked him if we might take a carriage, he shook his head.

“I need the time to think,” he said, and moderated his pace a little.

It was now after eleven o’clock: I had heard the clock strike when we neared it. The fog of earlier had lifted, leaving the air chill with midnight clarity. My breath formed patches of mist and then dissipated before me as I walked, along with a thousand fears and fancies. I could only hope that Cole’s thoughts were more productive than mine.

“Are we going back to the Dockside?” I risked asking at last. Perhaps Haywood could offer us more information, though I did not relish reliving that nightmare scene.

“Not quite,” he answered shortly.

And indeed, once we had reached the waterfront we veered off north, in the direction of the Navy Yard and the Arsenal. I could see the lights on the two guard-towers gleam against the dark bulk of the buildings, extending around the Yard’s artificial harbour and blocking out the stars.

The crowded wharves and docks and poorer quarters were behind us: this stretch of the waterfront had been worked up into a kind of promenade, with a stony beach below. It was a pale shadow of the southern watering-places to which the city’s rich flocked in the summer, but it provided a view of the sea for the aspiring classes. During the day in fine weather, one might see our fellow tradespeople pretending at leisure by taking the air here, among crowds of children and vendors of pies and ices and cheap watercolours. Now, late at night and at the decline of the season, the promenade was empty but for ourselves: anyone seeking solitude had long ago found a sheltered place for it inland.

Benjamin’s steps slowed as we reached the walkway, and finally he stopped altogether and turned to lean against the railing.

I stood beside him. The harbour curved here, so that we could see both the Arsenal and the lights of the city’s southern edge. But directly before us, excepting a few ships in the distance, there was an expanse of midnight blackness that reached all the way to New Carthage.

“Are you going to tell me what it is you’ve discovered?” I asked, shivering from more than cold. I did not enjoy being near the sea, certainly not in such circumstances. “What did that man’s raving mean?”

I listened to the muffled sound of the waves on the shingles below – approach and retreat and approach again, a mesmerising and dangerous sound – thinking that he would not answer me. We stood so close that I could feel the warmth of his shoulder through my coat, but there seemed, as ever, to be an ocean of icy water between us.

“It all fits together,” Benjamin Cole said at last. He spoke very quietly, so that it was an effort to hear him over the waves. “My master’s work, your husband’s illness. The three mysterious deaths. Even that poor monstrous creature I was dissecting when your brother first came to see me, do you remember?” He lifted his hand from the rail and motioned out into the darkness. “ _Mare tingerem, si mercurius esset_. Someone has taken that pronouncement far too literally.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, though I could not strike quite the tone I intended, “that you shall have to explain further than that.”

He half-turned to me, his eyebrows raised. “You are aware, of course, of the first and most ancient goal of alchemy? It is not one which most modern alchemists tend to discuss, but—”

“The Philosopher’s Stone,” I murmured.

“The Stone, the Egg, the Tincture, the Powder of Projection…It has gone under many names. It has also, after centuries of fruitless experimentation, been deemed to be impossible.” He leaned out further over the water, and if the railing had not been so high I should have feared for his safety. “Well, my old master, Francis Mortimer, was not one to yield to the impossible. Having followed all the former studies, the fraudulent and the true, he decided to seek the Tincture by a new method. We had already made some progress on that score when he was arrested.”

“And you believe that the Generality has continued his research and succeeded?” I asked. I twisted away from the ocean with relief, watching his sharp profile outlined against the city lights. “Was that what Haywood meant: _the small work and the great_? What about the ruddy man and the white lady?”

“It is the old esoteric speech of alchemy: the puffers are still fond of it. The Ruddy Man is sophic sulphur; the White Lady, sophic mercury – their union represents the Stone. Though in truth, it is not really a marriage, for there are the three first principles involved: sulphur and mercury and salt—”

He caught himself up abruptly. “Really,” he went on, “I am a prize fool for not seeing it earlier: the different character of all those deaths. The melancholic woman who bled to death, the sanguine man whose liver failed, the choleric dead of thirst…They were all poisoned by the Tincture.”

“But I had always heard,” I said, “that the Philosopher’s Stone was meant to be some sort of life-giving Elixir, perhaps to confer immortality. How could anyone be poisoned by it?”

Cole shook his head impatiently. “Children’s tales. From a scientific point of view, the Tincture is no more than an extreme transformative reagent. In a high enough concentration, it can change every substance into its contrary. Blood to black bile, moisture to dryness… It is the ultimate aim of alchemy, because alchemy is the science of change. But it would be extremely dangerous if it existed. The true adepts have always known that.”

I thought about it – the consequences of such a thing – and all I could picture was chaos and destruction. I recalled the Carthaginian legend of the covetous king, who wished for gold and killed all living things with his touch.

“Why would one ever want to create something so volatile?” I asked. “I can see its interest for a scientist, but the Generality…” I stopped, as my thoughts caught up with me.

“The Generality,” Benjamin Cole said, with a lifetime of disgust in his voice, “would use it in their war against New Carthage.”

“To make gold? They could refill all the Treasury—”

“Do get your mind away from gold! Gold is the stuff of stories because it is bright and glitters; it is the stuff of science because it has useful alchemical properties. But its only use for currency is in its scarcity. You seem to have a head for figures, Miss Bannister, so just consider what the effect would be of an infusion of so much gold into the marketplace.”

“It would lose its value.”

“Precisely. Perhaps a few hundred years ago, they might have been blind enough to do it. But now, after the thousands ruined in the colonial market crashes… No, it is far worse than that. I imagine they wish to use it as a weapon.”

“As a poison?” I thought quickly, trying to keep up with his conjectures. “You think Charles was deliberately poisoned?”

“I do not know.” It wasn’t an admission he enjoyed making. “If so, it would likely have been my own life they aimed at, for I am the only other person to know of Mortimer’s research. If not, then we have to consider how much of the fish being sold at the Dockside markets contains traces of the Tincture. It would be an epidemic in truth.”

I shuddered. The icy sea wind brought tears to my eyes and whipped loose strands of hair about my face. “What about the others? The other deaths?”

“They were all connected to the Generality in some way. Lady Elridge is a General’s wife, Colonel Warner a prominent junior member.”

“And Featherstonehaugh?”

“If you think that rich merchant-bankers are not intimately connected with the Generality,” he said, “then you are even more innocent in the ways of this city than I thought.”

“All right, so they might all have discovered something about the experiments. And that is why they were killed?”

“We may never know for certain,” Cole said, “but my current feeling is that those deaths were accidents. Anyone presented with the legendary Philosopher’s Stone would be eager to take home a portion; not being alchemists, they might be careless about its handling. It is a shame we never saw the lady’s body – I believe she might have been buried with an unusual red jewel, a recent present from her husband.” He leaned back from the railing, exhaling. “I am used to talking things over like this with Charles. But we are losing time.”

I felt obscurely complimented, though I had done no more than ask him questions: anyone might have managed as much. “What is it you plan to do?”

He pointed out toward the Navy Yard. “They must be manufacturing the Tincture there, for it to have contaminated the sea water. We will go there and attempt to collect a sample, which should aid me in arriving at an antidote.”

He spoke so casually that for a moment I did not understand what he was talking about: sneaking into the Generality’s Arsenal and stealing a portion of what had to be their most valuable and zealously-guarded possession. In lieu of telling him that he was mad, however, I said, “If you know so much about its workings, surely that ought to be enough to counteract it?”

“Everything I know,” Benjamin Cole replied, “everything that I have told you – it is pure theory. I may say that it is red, that it is a powder, that it is transformative…but I _know_ nothing. The creation of the Tincture is utterly unprecedented in the history of the world.”

“And you wish to see it,” I realised. The watchlights blinked scarlet from the tops of the Arsenal towers, reflected in the dark depths of the sea.

“I am an alchemist,” he answered. “Of course I wish to see it, more than I wish to draw breath. But, Miss Bannister...you must know that it is not my continued breathing which is currently in question.”


	9. Chapter 9

The black water slapped gently against the bricks near the entrance to the Arsenal, tamed within its canals. I was grateful for our dark clothes and the lack of moonlight, which might help us to avoid being spotted from the towers above, but I did not have much faith. I had known as soon as Cole told me where we were headed that we should probably never return again. Yet I did not blame him for not warning me earlier – with Charles in danger, I should certainly have gone regardless.

Cole leaned in close to speak into my ear. “There are sentries posted here, and the building we want will be at the back, behind the harbour: probably facing the water. We’ll have to make our way around, and hope that they aren’t expecting a threat from inland.”

He took my arm and we walked on along the path, not hurrying – as though we were an ordinary couple out for a midnight stroll. Then, once we were deep in the shadow of the left-hand tower, he pulled me sharply to the side.

The Arsenal towers were of red brick, but the fence that surrounded them was metal, links of it woven so fine that it was nearly impossible to see through, and topped with pointed spikes. Cole reached into his jacket and pulled out a vial of liquid, which he poured onto the fence just where it met the wall: it seemed to rust before my eyes, darkening and crumbling to powder. When it was done, there was a gap just wide enough for a single person to pass.

Benjamin Cole was lean enough to slip through with room to spare: I pulled my skirts in close and followed, glad that I was unencumbered by a fashionable lady’s bustles and crinolines. The ground crackled with dead weeds; my hair snagged on the ends of rusted wire. Distantly, I realised that I was not wearing my hat – I had taken it off when we arrived at Aurelian Street with Charles, and never resumed it. Such social niceties seemed impossibly remote now, and my ears were beyond feeling the cold.

Then we were out in open space again. The artificial harbour was to our left, its obsidian surface reflecting the phlogiston lamps that surrounded it at evenly-spaced intervals. Beyond that circle of light, I could just make out the dark outlines of ships undergoing construction or repair. Around the harbour clustered the various structures of the Navy Yard, built low and square.

The silence was broken only by the wind, and the swell of the water, and a kind of low hum – or perhaps voices – on the very edge of my hearing.

“I do hope,” I dared to whisper, “that you have a powder of invisibility within your stores.”

“Alas, but no,” Cole answered. “In any case, I have already said that I would bring no preparations of my own within these walls.”

“Then what was...” I pointed back toward the damaged fence.

“A simple corrosive. Now come along, and quietly.”

He seemed to know where we were going, whether from familiarity with the layout or some sort of alchemist’s instinct. We wove between the shadows of the walls until we came to a square building at the very bottom of the harbour.

Although the Arsenal’s artificial bay dated back to the old Carthaginian Empire, the Navy Yard was newly-built and utilitarian. The walls we faced were of close-laid brick, the windows small and heavily-barred – I was reminded of seaside warehouses or a factory in the southern suburbs, such as I had sometimes passed by in a carriage.

We crept around to the most concealed corner before Cole tugged on my arm, urging me to try and look within. There were no windows on the ground floor, but the first floor was low enough for him to see into easily, and for me if I stood on tip-toe in my boots.

The glass was dirty with grime that clung to my fingertips, like the surfaces in a poorly-ventilated kitchen. I slid my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped at it through the bars, making myself a small peep-hole to look through. The brick wall vibrated strangely where I leaned against it, and beside me Benjamin Cole had gone very still.

And then my eyes adjusted, and I could see inside.

After living some time with alchemists, I had acquired a rudimentary understanding of their equipment. I could recognize an athanor: the squat, self-feeding coal furnace called ‘Slow Harry’ by the vulgar. I knew how it looked with a sealed Hermetic vessel perched atop it, like the egg after which it was named. Benjamin Cole had one about a yard high in the corner of his laboratory; sometimes, when they were conducting some slow and delicate operation, Charles would rise in the middle of the night to check the temperature and the supply of coal.

In the cavernous chamber before us, dully lit by phlogiston light, there were dozens of athanors – perhaps hundreds – arranged in ranks. Each was the height of a man or taller; the air was dim with the smoke that poured from their chimneys.

Something dark glistened between them, which I soon realized was water: channels of water diverted from the harbour, for cooling? The alchemists attached such importance to precise degrees of heat: sand-heat and water-heat and ash-heat… And if that water should then flow back out to sea, I wondered – would it bring death in its wake?

This was no mere backroom alchemical laboratory. It had reminded me of a factory because it was one: a factory, a hatchery for the Philosopher’s Egg.

“What now?” I asked, my voice hushed with more than caution, for even I in my ignorance had some idea of what this meant.

I looked over at Cole, expecting to see the feverish excitement that heralded his scientific discoveries. Perhaps it was the light, however, but I found him strangely serene: like an old man on his deathbed, all his goals fulfilled or forgotten.

“Now,” he said after a moment, “we must try and find our way inside. As I told you, I shall require a sample. There ought to be a back door, or some place where they pump in the water…”

It was madness, all of it: we were attempting to steal the most precious substance in what was likely one of the best-guarded places in the Empire. But when I thought again of what was at stake – Charles lying in pain and helpless in Aurelian Street – I could find no way to protest against it.

“Take courage, Miss Bannister,” Cole murmured; possibly he guessed at my uncertainty, though he seemed to be speaking more to himself than to me. “We are, quite literally, besieging the Citadel of Alchemy. If our steps are light and our hearts are pure, how can we fail?”

And in the very next moment, we found out.

“Halt!” ordered a male voice behind us, though we were not moving. “Turn around slowly, with your hands in full view.”

My heart dropped out, stuttered, and then resumed beating. After all (wish as I might for a powder of invisibility), I could not really claim to be surprised. I had known how this was likely to end from the first.

The man addressing us wore a sergeant’s uniform, with a sergeant’s pistol pointed at each of us in turn, before settling on Cole as the more dangerous of the party. In his other hand, he held up an oil lantern to light our faces.

“You can have no legitimate business here,” he stated.

Benjamin Cole, who generally had a reply for everything, chose not to answer. I followed his lead. Anything we said, after all, could be used in a trial against us – though I thought it very improbable that it should ever come to a trial.

The sergeant waited for another moment, and then shook his head at us impatiently. He had drawn a long, cold duty, Arsenal night-guard on the cusp of winter: his nose and cheeks were red in the light of the lantern. I could only imagine how the two of us looked – like frightened, dishevelled prey, and certainly no better than we should be.

“I’m taking you both to the Commandant,” he said at last, gesturing with his weapon for us to move. “You’d best come quietly.”

And so we did not have to find our way into that building, after all, for he led us there himself. A place less like the fabled Citadel of Alchemy could hardly be imagined: it was as plain within as without, the walls of the same unfinished brick and the floor of some alchemical preparation like stone. The sound of our steps on it was dull and echoing.

Phlogiston lamps were set along the corridor but turned very low, nowhere near the brightness of the streetlights: just enough to see by, but leaving deep pools of shadow between them. It seemed less like a factory to me now than a prison.

Such a bleak spot in which to be sentenced to death, I thought. Charles, with all his honest love for ancient architecture, would hardly have appreciated it. My hands were shaking in their gloves.

The Commandant’s office lay not far from the entrance, brighter light spilling out from under the door. The sergeant ushered us inside, prodding us with his pistol: I don’t suppose he made many arrests, and must have relished the chance when he could.

“I found these two persons lurking outside, sir,” he announced.

The Commandant, seated at his desk and doing paperwork beneath a green-shaded lamp, looked up at us. He was a fairly young man, though his hair was beginning to recede around his broad face; it was difficult to tell in the light, but he seemed to have the weathered tan of colonial service. A single medal was pinned to his breast.

Somehow, I had been expecting a more august and intimidating personage. I soon realised, however (the thought coming to me in Benjamin Cole’s hectoring tones), that this could hardly be some central Arsenal authority – he must oversee this building only, and that perhaps solely at night. That it possessed its own commandant at all emphasized the place’s importance, though one look through the windows had already told us that.

My mind spun in such mad circles, lest I disgrace myself by fainting. It was one thing to expect capture -- quite another to face it, the thing I had feared most ever since I first learned to harbour adult fears. James, I thought, would be so very disappointed.

“What were they doing, precisely?” the Commandant asked, putting down his pen and rubbing at the bridge of his nose.

“They were out by the western windows, sir. I heard them whispering.”

“I see.” His tiredness did not blunt the force of his gaze when he finally looked at us. “That is unauthorised trespass at the very least. Considering the classified nature of our enterprise, it is also military espionage and treason. You know the penalty, both of you?”

Beside me, Cole nodded curtly and volunteered nothing further for a moment. Then, as though the words were being wrenched out of him, he said, “Miss Bannister is innocent of any crime.”

“That remains to be determined.” The Commandant sighed: I could tell this duty pleased him far less than it did his subordinate. Perhaps, having served in New Carthage, he was more familiar with the nature of traitors’ deaths. “Though not by me. You will be kept here and interrogated by the proper authorities in the morning. You will wish to cooperate with them fully – it may spare you pain, if not your lives.” He waved a dismissal to the sergeant and turned back to his work, murmuring as we were lead out, “One might think the New Carthaginians would send more capable spies.”

We were taken away by a guard of three under the sergeant’s supervision, with weapons trained on us the whole way: a pair of dangerous, if incompetent, criminals. They did not lead us toward the athanor chamber but down, into the damp earth of the Arsenal, which with every step I felt closing in about my head. At the bottom of the steps, a door opened into a single, dark holding cell.

Cole’s mouth was set in a hard line: he seemed, by the fitful lamplight, to have been hewn from stone. At the last, he turned to the sergeant and demanded, “Surely you will afford Miss Bannister the comforts owing to her sex? A private room, with a female warden?”

The sergeant was busy inspecting the room – to discover any tunnels dug by former prisoners, I suppose – and did not dignify him with an answer.

“Much as I appreciate the chivalric gesture,” I whispered, as we were herded inside by the guards, “can’t you see that I would rather be shut up with a—an accomplice at a time like this, than enjoy all the comforts owing to my sex, alone?”

“All the same—”

“The severity of your crime forbids it,” the sergeant said shortly, as the door shut behind him.

*

We sat for a while in silence, while I took stock of our prison. It measured approximately five feet square, though the ceiling was high for an underground chamber – too high for a man to reach. The walls were all of stone, laid close together and damp with the proximity of water. A small barred window was set up near the ceiling, at this hour admitting only distant, artificial light.

I smoothed down my coat and sat leaning back against the wall, a foot away from where Benjamin Cole was doing the same, his hands across his knees. My stays dug into my sides, and I envied him his loose-limbed posture and calm silence.

He had not wanted me here with him. But there was nothing I could do about that, and I refused to apologise for it.

“Well,” I said at last, if only to hear my voice echo against the walls, “as a rescue this has not been entirely successful.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“But at least we have learned that they really are manufacturing the Philosopher’s Stone in quantity – the Tincture,” I corrected myself, substituting his preferred term.

“And a great deal of good that will do us, when we are burned for treason on the morrow.”

I turned to face him, though I could not make out his features in the dark. My nerves hung by a thread. “I do appreciate your optimistic attitude, Mr. Cole,” I said. “Tell me, if I plead very loudly, do you think they might still see fit to separate us?”

I heard him give an impatient huff. “There is no point in deluding you with false hopes. What we have done is espionage, and we shall be punished accordingly. The fact that we are being permitted to spend the night in the same cell ought to tell you that much. The laws of propriety do not apply to the dead.”

So, that had been the cause of his earlier insistence – to ascertain if there was any chance for us. I huddled closer in my coat against the chill: at least it was the old greatcoat I kept for country walks, rather than the more fashionable jacket I’d purchased for town. I could not help thinking of the interrogation the Commandant had mentioned – it would go on until we had confessed to their satisfaction, if not beyond. And then the fire, Cole had said – it was to be fire after all, and not water. At least I would not die as my parents had done.

“I have always expected to come to such an end, sooner or later,” Benjamin Cole said quietly. “Francis Mortimer’s execution was a prophecy of my own. My only regret is to have been the cause of your demise, not to mention…”

“Charles,” I finished. I buried my head in my folded arms. “Oh, God. If he is in pain – if he is getting worse, even at this moment…”

I could not go on. A dozen scenarios presented themselves to my mind, each more distressing than the last. And perhaps the worst of all was to imagine Charles somehow surviving his illness, only to discover what had become of us. It was not vanity that made me fear it, but a knowledge of my husband’s character: once Charles gave his heart, he gave it wholly, leaving the recipient endeavouring to deserve the gift. He would have far more happily laid down his own life for us. And what sort of life would remain to him, with his wife and partner both condemned traitors? If, by some miracle, a life did remain…

I was weeping. I tried to do it quietly, aware that Benjamin Cole would not wish to hear me. For all that he had indulged my moment of weakness at Feversham, perhaps through the influence of the drug the Headmistress had given him, he was usually impatient with such displays.

Somehow, that thought gave me the strength to recover myself: I did not wish to further provoke his irritation. I pulled out a handkerchief from my sleeve and dried my eyes.

“So,” Cole said in the same soft, matter-of-fact manner, once I was more composed, “you really do care for him. I had wondered.”

In my fragile condition, it was enough to shatter me once more, though this time the predominant emotion was anger rather than grief. “How _can_ you have?” I demanded. “How can you even ask me that? Of course I—”

The even voice was the same in the dark, cutting over my shrill exclamation. “It was all so very sudden, you see. In all the years I’d known him, Charles had never once mentioned a wish to marry. And then, one moment we were saving the school from a carnivorous Worm who devoured its Headmistress, and the next, he was announcing his engagement to the Headmistress’s private secretary – a plain woman of no apparent extraordinary qualities whatsoever.”

I tried my utmost not to show myself wounded: what did it matter what he might think of me now? And yet still the question slipped out:  “But Charles said… He told me you thought that I might be useful. In your work.”

“I thought you were an excellent secretary, Miss Bannister,” Cole said bluntly. “Quiet, organised, moderately intelligent. All very useful characteristics for a shop assistant, but somewhat insufficient for a wife.”

Oh, what would you know about it, I wanted to tell him acidly, but I felt suddenly far too weary. “Is that why you persist in calling me that?” I asked. “Because you don’t think that I was worthy to marry him?”

Cole snorted. “Don’t be absurd. Would you really prefer to be _Mrs. Charles Templer_ – to have your very being subsumed to his, as though the previous twenty-eight years of your life had never happened? Simply because it is the convention, does not mean that I have to stand for it.”

An admirable sentiment, I thought; I wonder how he reconciles it to his dream of New Carthage, where the women live behind screens and veils? I did not ask him to bypass the question by calling me by my given name – if sharing a condemned prisoners’ cell had not elicited that intimacy, surely there was nothing on earth that would.

“Well, I don’t care what you think,” I said, shutting my eyes against the darkness. “Except that you are Charles’s friend, and I know that your disapproval hurts him. If our engagement was a mistake, as you say, then we have been rewarded beyond measure for it. Disbelieve it if you choose, but he means all the world to me now. That is why I am here. It isn’t for the pleasure of your company.”

I heard Cole exhale on a long sigh, and even in the dark I could picture him leaning back against the wall, the sharp outline of his up-tilted profile. “ _Good_ ,” he whispered fervently.

We were talking almost as if it all still mattered, this tangle of feelings between us. But then, of course, it did matter. When I went to the pyre, Charles would be my only thought. In this, at least, Benjamin Cole and I were agreed.

*

Somehow, the night passed. They brought us no food or water, thinking, I suppose, that we would have no need of them soon enough. It grew terribly cold in the underground room: I huddled down within my coat, but refused to move closer to Cole. I was not angry at him, not really – he had never asked for my presence, in that cell or in his life. But it was a bitter thing, to spend my last hours with a man who resented me so deeply.

I was shivering too hard to rest, and I do not think that he slept much either. Perhaps he was formulating a plan to extricate us from this situation, in which case I hoped that he would hurry. The scrap of night sky beyond the bars grew gradually paler.

If I had fallen into a reverie at last, the rattling of the door brought me abruptly back to wakefulness. Did they mean to execute us at dawn, in the time-honoured fashion? Beside me – he must have shifted while I dozed – I felt Benjamin Cole tense, muttering imprecations under his breath. I tried to search my own childhood for a prayer, and found none I might believe in.

At last, our cell was opened: I blinked against the sudden incursion of phlogiston light, temporarily blinded after our long hours in the dark.

“Well,” Charles’s voice said from the doorway. “This is certainly a fine mess you’ve got yourselves into.”

Once my vision cleared, I could see him standing there: pale, obviously exhausted, with shadows under his eyes and a day’s growth of beard. He looked utterly magnificent, and yet ordinary enough that I could believe he was not some illusion sent to deceive me.

Somehow I managed to get to my feet, despite my stiffly frozen limbs, and in the next moment I was in his arms. I pressed my face against his collar, breathing him in – pipesmoke and lunary and the lingering odour of the somnifer den – aware that I was trembling and unable to stop.

Charles kept one arm tight around me and extended the other, and I turned my head to see Benjamin Cole still standing where he had risen, shoulders hunched, staring down intently at his shoes.

“Benjamin,” Charles said: just the one word, rich in shades of meaning.

He looked up at the sound of his name. The light from the door showed him very clearly: grimy and disreputable, with an expression on his face which he was trying very hard to hide, but which I could read as clearly as if it had been my own – for it must, so often, have been my own. He came forward hesitantly to take the hand Charles offered, and then Charles gave a sob of laughter and pulled him forward, so that he could embrace us both.

We stood thus for only a moment, but in that moment I could breathe out all the fears of that interminable night, and believe that perhaps we might be safe. At the very least, we were all now together.

Then Charles set us back and gave us as stern a look as he could manage, considering the smile that kept threatening to escape. “You are lucky I was able to find you,” he said. “A few more hours, and you might have been buried in some bureaucratic oubliette in the Generality buildings, where I’d never have managed to secure your release.”

“Then you have… How in Heaven’s name—?” It was perhaps the first time I had seen Benjamin Cole lost for words.

“The base Commandant is an old army friend of mine,” he explained. “Once I had realised where you’d gone, the two of us were able to clear the matter up to our mutual satisfaction. You do realise,” he added ruefully to Benjamin, “that if you had once referred to my wife by her married name in his hearing, much of this might have been prevented?”

Cole ignored him, reaching up to take his temperature with the back of one hand. “But you are better? You are safe?”

“In your quest for heroism, my dear fellow,” Charles answered mildly, “I think you’ve been forgetting that I, too, am an alchemist. After Bannister gave me something for the pain, I could think clearly enough to untangle all your gnomic pronouncements. With time and the contents of our laboratory, I cobbled together an antidote for myself. I may not make the intuitive leaps that you do, Benjamin, but my theory _is_ sound.”

“You’re a brilliant alchemist,” I said, with the force of a vow.

Charles ducked his head. “It was only a small dose, after all, and we caught it quickly: the effects were still localised enough to counteract. Now, wouldn’t the two of you like to leave this place? I have seen few more comfortless prisons.”

He led us out through the lamplit corridors, up the stairs and past the checkpoints and into the blessed air, where the eastern sky was lightening with the dawn. No one stopped us. But as we passed the guardroom, I saw the arresting sergeant looking out at me with a disapproval still greater than when he had believed me guilty of treason.

“What on earth did you tell them?” I asked Charles, as soon as we were safely back at Aurelian Street, ensconced in front of the fire with blankets and glasses of whisky and water. “How _did_ you get them to let us go?”

“Oh, it was absurdly simple,” Charles replied. “I didn’t have to tell them anything, only let them draw their own conclusions. My wife and the friend with whom we share rooms, out alone together at night, near a disreputable part of town? They assumed that you had got lost on your way to an assignation, particularly since you then insisted on being held together. And men are always very ready to believe in another’s misfortune.”

“So you would blacken all our reputations—” Cole began, flushing.

“For the sake of saving your lives, yes.”

Charles spoke with complete conviction. I relinquished the warmth of the blankets long enough to stretch out my hand for his.

Cole was looking between us, over the rim of his glass. “You realise, of course,” he muttered, “that this subterfuge of yours will not hold water long. As soon as word of my capture is brought to someone more senior than the night-watch commandant, they shall recognise what it means – what I have discovered. And then none of us shall be safe.”

My blood ran cold again, despite the blazing fire. “I do realise that,” Charles said calmly. “We will face it when it comes. For now, I think we should all get some sleep.”

A bed, with clean sheets and Charles beside me, telling me not to fear: it sounded like paradise. But I still was filled with fine jitters, as though my body were telling me something my mind had not yet understood. The west-facing sitting-room with its fire and candles was still comfortingly dark, but, beyond the walls, I knew that the sun had already risen on a new and freshly threatening day, in which we would all be exposed like flushed game.

“We really should go over it again,” I said, fighting through my exhaustion, “now that Charles is here. The Tincture – that factory of Hermetic vessels…You said it all began with that unnatural sea-monster you discovered…”

There was a moment’s silence, while the logs crackled in the fire. I almost thought that I might sleep, so strangely did time fold and stretch around me.

At last Cole said, in that quiet voice that spared me nothing, “Yet when I gave it more thought – as I had time to do in the cell – I realised that it must have really begun much earlier. That our first sign of such an extreme alchemical mutation came some months ago. In the spring.”

He looked at me steadily, and I knew, despite all my misgivings, that I would have to be the one to speak it. I squeezed Charles’s hand hard enough to hurt him. “We shall have to go back to Feversham,” I said.


	10. Chapter 10

The carriage we hired was a cheap one, and even sitting wedged between Charles’s shoulder and the window, my eyes were jolted open at the every bump in the road. I saw flashes of the Haven suburbs pass by in the grey mid-day light: rows upon rows of identical brick terraces with their patches of garden. Products of the last generation’s colonial prosperity, many of them now stood ramshackle or abandoned, the windows boarded up.

I had ended up dozing on the sofa that morning, lulled to sleep by the murmur of Charles and Cole talking by the fire. Benjamin was telling him about the ranks of athanors in the Navy Yard, and then I was dreaming: a confused vision of a field full of eggs trembling and cracking, just about to hatch.

Charles had woken me around ten o’clock, so that I just had time to wash and pack a small bag – all my small stock of jewels and valuables, along with a few days’ clean linen – while he went to fetch the carriage.

When I was packed, I spoke to Edith briefly. She was pale and sunken-eyed and frightened after the events of the night. I soothed her as much as I could; I did not have much comfort to offer. I advised her of what might be an extended absence, gave her her wages for the fortnight, and told her to go to my brother in Mansfield Terrace if she was in need of any help. I thought she would be safer without knowledge of our destination.

Finally, I turned the shop sign to _CLOSED_ and took a last look around with a funereal feeling – as though I were closing up a house of the dead. It was nonsense, of course: we would be back quite soon, and eventually this entire strange episode would be behind us. I told myself this, though I was hardly convinced.

Cole came out of the laboratory, locking the door behind him. He was dressed in shabby tweeds, a bulging carpet-bag at his side, clean-shaven and with his hair brushed back.

“Did you take the Speculum?” I asked.

He turned toward me, eyebrows raised. “What possible use could it be to us? There is nothing of it finished to speak of.”

I had noticed it before, the way he tried not to tell a lie directly. “But did you take it?”

Cole looked down at his travel-bag. “Yes. Along with a number of other sensitive experiments and preparations – as many as I can carry safely.”

I exhaled shakily. “Then we are truly not coming back. We’ve been ruined.” I knew even as I spoke that it was an inadequate word – ruin was what happened to society debutantes who had been indiscreet with their favours. What we faced was far more dangerous than that.

“There is a worse thing than ruin,” Cole said, “and that is cowardice. At least we have not been guilty of that.” He pulled out a slim volume from the side of his bag. “You should read this – perhaps it will help you to understand. It’s on the proscribed list, so you won’t have come across it. Though, oddly enough, the author is a namesake of yours.”

I looked at the book he offered me: it was _The Principles of Independent Thought_ by Dr. Philip Bannister, the title spelled out on the familiar blue cloth cover. “I _have_ come across it,” I said, with a slightly hysterical gulp of laughter. “It was written by my father.”

“Philip Bannister was your—” He looked suddenly very young, wide-eyed with startlement. “But I can hardly believe it.”

“It is not that common a name,” I said.

“I had thought to ask you about it last summer, in fact. But you seemed so demure – so _respectable_. And then when I met your brother at the wedding, and saw what he was…”

He had no right to judge James, I thought; no right to judge either of us. “I have worked my entire life to be respectable,” I told him, low and furious. “Ever since I learned what my father’s high principles cost him. He was killed for them, Mr. Cole, both he and my mother. Drowned off the Northern coast while on a mission of mercy, with no witnesses to say how the boat went down. Only the fishermen all agreed that the day was calm, and the sea free of dangers.”

There had been no real evidence – nothing to prove that their friends’ suspicions were not a wild fancy. James and I were allowed to inherit the small property they left behind; we had at least, some people whispered, been spared the ignominy of a public trial. But we were orphaned, all the same.

“That book is a dream,” I said, pushing it back toward him. “You must know that reality is far harsher.”

Cole did not answer me for a moment, head bent to adjust the straps on his bag. “You have been braver than I realised, Miss Bannister,” he said at last. “I’m sorry to have involved you in this.”

“I gave you no choice.” The door jangled open behind us: that was Charles with the carriage. “We were given no choice, any of us.”

“I want you to know that I have a card in reserve, if worst comes to worst,” Benjamin said to me, bending to whisper quickly in my ear. “Only I hope I shall not have to use it.”

*

Now he sat on the bench across from us, wrapped in his greatcoat and absorbed in a different book, its spine labelled with angular letters.

“I did not realise you spoke New Carthaginian, Mr. Cole,” I said, my voice coming out as a sleepy murmur.

He glanced up at me over his volume: though he looked less dishevelled than usual, he somehow reminded me of an irritated cat. “I am teaching myself the language, so as to read some of the learned texts that make it through the blockade.”

“I should think it would be easier for you,” Charles volunteered, “since you studied classical Carthaginian at University.”

“Oh honestly, Charles,” Cole said, bristling and more feline than ever. “They share an alphabet, but they are entirely different languages – entirely different. Separated by an ocean in their development. The name New Carthage itself is linguistic nonsense, when ‘Carthage’ already means ‘new city’…”

“Yes, my dear fellow,” Charles said tolerantly. “But I could teach you the odds and ends of spoken language I picked up in the service, if you like. You should have asked me before.”

I nodded off again against his arm, listening to them exchange brief phrases in a foreign tongue, the clatter of carriage-wheels and the fitful splashes of rain on the window. None of us wished to discuss what might lie behind or before us. Cole would have said that it was unprofitable to speculate ahead of experimental evidence, with a quotation from one of his learned sources; Charles would have said that we’d face obstacles as they came. I would have said that I was frightened. It all came to the same thing.

Outside, the buildings gradually thinned out and the spaces between them widened: we were reaching the countryside now, where Haven city merged into Intmoor beyond. Soon, woodland obscured any view of the houses from the road, giving the wealthy their privacy even in this leafless season.

I remembered Colonel Frederick Warner, who would have ended his life in one such manor, surrounded by his retinue of servants, thirsting to death. And utterly alone: neither James nor Cole had mentioned any family. Did he know, at the last, what it was that had killed him – the scarlet powder that promised wealth and eternal life? There were red spots behind my eyes when I closed them again.

About tea-time, the countryside we passed became more familiar: that village sign, that alley of trees, all leading inexorably toward my former home. At last, our carriage drove up to the gates of Feversham itself, where the porter was napping at the gatehouse window.

“Miss Phoebe!” he exclaimed, once I had got out to rap against the glass. “Is that really you?”

“Hello, Patrick.” I smiled despite myself. “How are you?”

“Well now,” he replied, while his answering smile darkened into a gloomy expression, “I have my health and my post as yet, and that’s a blessing, but it’s bad times here at the Academy, Miss, I don’t mind telling you. The new term hasn’t started up though it’s nearly winter, and the Governors are thinking of closing the place down altogether. What with a girl missing, and then the Headmistress, well…”

“Of course.” I bit my lip, wondering how best to proceed. With the fall term not convened – and surely it spoke to how brutally I had severed all my ties here, not to have heard even that much – my excuse of visiting old friends rang hollow. Few of the staff remained at Feversham outside term-time.

In the end, I settled for something like honesty. “I am here with Mr. Cole and my husband, Mr. Templer – you remember them from the investigation in the spring? They have a few final questions to clear up about what happened.”

“After all this time?” Patrick asked dubiously. “What difference does it make? Unless... if there is something they might tell the Governors, to make them…”

I shook my head, not wishing to give him false hope. “I doubt it will be anything like that. But alchemy is all in the detail – one doesn’t always know what might prove significant until much later.”

“I thought alchemy was to make us all rich and immortal,” he joked. “Do your gentlemen say when that’ll come along, Miss?”

A chill went through me, when I thought of such childhood stories of the miraculous Stone being transformed into those ranks of steaming furnaces at the Arsenal, poisoning everything they touched. I imagined a young conscripted soldier wondering thus at his first New Carthaginian dragon, only to have it spill burning death upon his head. We hardly deserved magic, if these were the uses we put it to.

“I don’t know, Patrick,” I said, more heavily than I wished to. “Would you let us through the side gate? We can walk on to the school from here.”

Our hired coach turned on the road back to Haven. I knew we could not afford to keep the horses and driver waiting, but as we walked down the leaf-covered path through the grounds, I winced at the thought of having no escape route ready. Charles, by my side, must have noticed my discomfort: “How shall we get home if there’s a need?” he asked.

Benjamin looked grim. “We will deal with that question when it arises. In any case, you must realise that it may become…inadvisable for us to return to Haven.”

Once glance at Charles’s face told me that he had not anticipated this possibility. “But we can hardly just leave like this. Your work – all our possessions—”

“I have brought away what I could,” Cole said. “You’ve been reading the papers, Charles, you know how volatile the political situation is. All your army friends together couldn’t save us from a second imprisonment. It may only be for a time,” he added, without great conviction.

“But surely they wouldn’t arrest Charles,” I said. “With his record…”

As soon as I said it, I knew what Cole would reply: that he had compromised himself sufficiently by securing our release. But it was Charles himself who interrupted me first.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, more sharply that I had ever heard from him. “We are all implicated now. All that we can do is discover as much as possible, so that perhaps we will have some knowledge to bargain with.”

He hardly sounded like Charles: he was even standing differently, more like a military man than the unassuming scholar’s stoop he had acquired. He spoke with such finality that there the matter rested.

By then we had reached the end of the alley, and the main entrance to the school was before us. It was an old building – the foundations dated to a fort built shortly after the fall of Carthage – and had served as a convalescent hospital before Augustus Feversham, in the first dawn of female education, had converted it into a school for girls.

The façade he’d built had the simple lines popular in the last century, obscured somewhat by growing ivy. In fair weather, drawing classes might once have been out here sketching it. Now, although the steps were still clean-swept, there was not a soul in sight.

“So, now we are here,” I said, “what shall we do?”

Cole turned his sharp gaze toward me, and I was helplessly reminded of their investigation here in the spring. “Miss Bannister, if I wished to find out something about the history of this school or one of its members, whom would I consult?”

“Mr. Naseby, the librarian,” I answered readily: all that I knew of Feversham and had tried to forget was returning to me. “He has been here longer than anyone else.”

*

The school library was a vaulted room with a gallery running along it, study desks in the middle and the walls covered with bookshelves. It was only a small collection, by the standards of the universities Cole and Charles had attended; to me as a child, it had contained the world.

Mr. Naseby leaned over his circular desk, exactly the same as ever: a small man, and very fair-haired even before he began to go grey. Perhaps this quirk of inheritance was why, despite his many talents, he had spent his life working in a country school for girls. We were mongrels all, of course, living reminders of a history of trade and conquest between our Northern and Carthaginian ancestors, but it was not fashionable to acknowledge the visible manifestations of this, at either extreme. Northerners were shunned and ‘Carthies’ feared; both treated as potential traitors.

Mr. Naseby looked up when I coughed, his pale eyes narrowing at me myopically. “Can I help you, Miss Bannister?” he asked, for all the world as though I were still a student come to research an essay.

It occurred to me that I did not know what to ask him. “My friends have some questions for you, sir,” I said instead. “Mr. Cole and Mr. Templer, Mr. Naseby.”

“Ah, the Haven alchemists!” the librarian said at once. “I corresponded with you on a matter of book preservation, these three years ago. Your advice was most helpful.”

I had long since ceased to be surprised by the curious phenomenon of Mr. Naseby’s memory: he might recall any number of seeming minutiae, but I doubted that he was aware of the current closure of the school, or of the reasons for it.

“Then perhaps you could aid us in turn,” Cole said to him. “I was wondering what you might know about Mrs. Laura Sheldon, the former Headmistress here. Who was her husband, for instance?”

Mr. Naseby blinked at us. “Oh, but Laura Sheldon never married, you know: it was a courtesy title we called her by. Sheldon was her father’s name – he was an officer in the old Colonial Administration.”

“And her mother was New Carthaginian?”

“Yes... Now that was a story fit for the novels.” He shuffled some papers on the desk: his way of putting his thoughts in order. “The girl had been captured for sedition against the Colonial government – one of their hedge-witches, I believe, brewing up explosives for the early rebels. Sheldon took a fancy to her and had her paroled into his care; some species of marriage was even performed between them, and they lived for some time together. But in a way, it was lucky that she died before the Rebellion began in force – he could have never brought her home, you see, or remained there and lived.”

His spoke in a hushed tone, stretching out each phrase: I never would have suspected Mr. Naseby of possessing such a streak of romanticism.

“A tragic story,” Benjamin Cole agreed. “And how old was Laura Sheldon at this time?”

“Just ten or so. She was sent to be educated here, at Feversham, once her father returned from the West. Yes, I remember it well: I taught History then, and I never met a more strong-minded pupil.”

“Strong-minded in what sense?”

I could not imagine where this line of inquiry was heading; it was, in any case, nearly impossible for me to picture the Headmistress as a girl. But the librarian’s pale eyes glistened in reminiscence. “Oh, she had an opinion on every subject, you know. Particularly on current affairs. Most pupils that age only parrot the ideas of their parents, but not Laura Sheldon – she would have dominated every discussion, if I had let her.”

“Then her ideas were not in keeping with what you might have expected from her father?” Cole asked sharply.

“Not at all.” He glanced between us with sudden suspicion, a look I found distressingly familiar: the fear of denunciation, of the incautious word in the wrong ear. That it had extended even to this kind and unworldly man broke my heart, although I knew that, regardless, Mr. Naseby would tell us nothing but the truth. “They were purely orthodox,” he said at last. “Radically orthodox, if there is such a thing, while her father had been sympathetic to the colonials. But one can always tell true conviction, and she had it.”

Something in Cole’s expression told me that this was what he had wished to hear. “What did she study apart from history? Languages? The sciences?”

“The girls all follow a similar curriculum,” Naseby said. “I could consult the records…”

Cole waved this away. “Perhaps later. How long, exactly, did Laura Sheldon serve as Headmistress here?”

“After she finished school, she went home to nurse her father through his last years. Then she returned here to teach, like yourself, Miss Bannister, and when the last Head retired – it must be fifteen or sixteen years ago now – Mrs. Sheldon was a natural candidate.”

So my own arrival at Feversham had coincided with Laura Sheldon’s elevation, though I could hardly recollect it. My only memories of that time were of homesickness and crushing loneliness, before I had settled into my place at the school.

“Thank you, sir,” Cole said, with a small bow. “You have done us a great service.”

“Was that all you wanted?” asked the librarian, blinking in surprise. “Old gossip? But I have records – books…”

“Unless they concern the transmutation of matter, I’m afraid they can help us no further at this time. Thank you, Mr. Naseby.” And he strode out of the library, with Charles at his heels.

I remained behind for a moment, looking around regretfully at the circular space lit by its clerestory windows: who could tell when I might see it again? I did not truly wish to return to Feversham – I did not wish to be the quietly obedient woman I had been at Feversham – and yet I could still feel a pang of longing for it. At least my duties and prospects here had been very clear.

I lowered my gaze from the gallery to find the librarian still watching me from behind his desk – unusual in itself, for no one who was not actively questioning him or damaging a book could generally command his attention.

“I do wish you the best of luck, Miss Phoebe,” he said gravely. “In your marriage and your new career.”

My first instinct was to protest, but in the end I only nodded acknowledgement. “Thank you, sir.”

“You are well-provided with books in Haven, I trust?”

“I am,” I said, smiling despite myself, “though I do not know when I shall manage…”

But, having assured himself of that much, Mr. Naseby had already turned back to his work. I left him to it, shutting the door behind me softly, so as not to disturb the peace and silence of that place.

*

“Benjamin,” Charles was saying to him out in the foyer, arms folded. “You know I might have been more helpful in that interview if you had told me what it was we were looking for.”

“Soon,” Cole said curtly. Seeing me emerge, he turned at once and continued onward, leaving us to follow after him through the empty reaches of the school.

The carpet runners muffled our steps as we walked along the gallery housing the portraits of former Heads. Their intellectual, generally dour faces frowned down at us from gilt frames as we passed: a century and half of genteel education. And there, at the very end of the gallery, I saw a new portrait that made me stop dead in my tracks.

It was the Headmistress, as I had known her – it must have been painted while she still lived, for no mere description could have conveyed the steel in her gaze or the straightness of her posture. It would have been like her to make such a provision, so that no misadventure befalling her could lead to a gap in the portrait gallery.

She wore a high-necked dress in dove grey silk, a cameo brooch at her throat, her thick dark hair piled up more ornately than she usually styled it. Her hands lay folded in her lap, holding a book half-open, the knuckles pronounced. The face was in keeping with the gallery’s conventions – a balance of mildness and sternness befitting a pedagogue – but it had been painted well; I could recognize the living woman in the quirk of the eyebrow, the lines in the papery skin around her eyes and mouth.

I half-expected to turn around to find her beside me, inspecting the portrait critically, but only my two companions stood there. Cole was half-frowning as he looked at it, his expression unreadable. And then he lifted one hand, and gave the Headmistress’s likeness a brisk, military salute. “To you, Mrs. Sheldon.”

“Benjamin?” Charles asked quizzically.

He shook his head, turning away from the portrait. “Never mind it now. Shall we go on?”

“If I may ask,” I ventured, hoping to succeed where Charles had failed, “where precisely are we going?”

“Do consider, Miss Bannister,” he replied, with more patience as I had expected. “After the girl’s disappearance this spring, every inch of the school was turned over – either by the search parties, or by ourselves – and nothing out of the ordinary was found, with the exception (a large exception, I concede) of the poisonous Worm in the cellars. Every place in the school was searched...except for one.”

It took me a moment, but at last I understood him. “The Headmistress’s rooms?”

“Precisely. She must have had at least one chamber of her own, apart from the parlour where she received us. Have you ever been inside it?”

I tried to remember. In all the years that I had known her… “Never,” I said. “I was fortunate enough to have her friendship, but she was a very private person to the last.”

“There, you see?” Cole said to Charles, as though they had been engaging in an argument. “So I propose that as our starting place. She lived in the east wing, did she not?”

We set off again, this time with me in the lead: it was a route, after all, that I had taken several times a day for years. Only now the corridors were deserted – as deserted as they had been during the holidays, on those occasions when I had remained at the school rather than going to visit my brother, but with an added impression of dust and disuse.

As we hurried along, I had the peculiar sense that I could glimpse movement at the corners of my vision: flashes of dark dresses and white pinafores, whispers of young female voices. I knew, however, that this was merely the result of fatigue and heightened emotion – despite what had happened here, Feversham contained no true ghosts. There were horrors enough in the world without imagining more.

At last, we reached the entrance to the Headmistress’s chambers. I drew a deep breath, wondering what I would find within – would the parlour be just as I had seen it last, with every item painstakingly in place, as if it awaited the return of its mistress? Would I expect to find her in her favourite chair, waiting for me to take dictation?

But in fact, when Benjamin Cole pushed open the unlocked door, I saw that the parlour had been cleaned out completely: all of her things removed, the fireplace swept, dust sheets placed over the furniture. Stripped of the force of the Headmistress’s personality, it was only another empty room. The bare floorboards echoed under our feet, strangely loud.

“I don’t know where they might have sent her possessions,” I said, feeling numb as I looked around me. “She had no near relations as far as I know, with both her parents dead. Most likely it was all donated to a charity.”

Cole was frowning darkly, pacing the perimeter of the room. “I wonder. And her bedchamber?”

“Through here, I think.” There had been a curtain over the doorway, set in between two bookcases: I had never seen it lifted, but I imagined that was where the Headmistress retreated at night.

The bookshelves were bare now, the curtain removed: what had lain behind it was a heavy wooden door with a polished lock set into it. Cole tried the handle, but none of us was surprised to find it secure.

“There’s no need to suspect a conspiracy, you know,” Charles said, understanding Cole’s thinking better than I did. “If anyone were after Mrs. Sheldon’s personal effects, they would have surely tried to force this door.”

“They may have _tried_ ,” Cole answered. “It’s reinforced. And this mechanism…”

Charles crouched down beside him, peering where he pointed. “The keyhole is so very small. Would one of our corrosives serve? Perhaps some dilute oil of vitriol?”

“I am not sure.” Cole ran his fingers gently over the lock, as though testing it. “It is an alloy such as I can’t recollect seeing before. I might almost think it whitened silver, if not…”

“You won’t have to break it,” I said abruptly, making the connection even as I spoke. “I think I have the key.”

I reached inside my blouse and pulled out the locket the Headmistress had given me for my birthday, nearly a year ago. It was the one piece of jewellery I wore most often: a silver oval, very plain, within which I had placed miniatures of my parents. It locked, but I kept the key on the chain beside it – there was nothing to hide in a pair of portraits.

Benjamin Cole came near and took the locket from my hand, examining it closely. His fingers brushed my throat, where the chain rested: I hoped he would not notice the pulse beating hard there. “It does appear to be the same material. Why have I never seen this before, Miss Bannister?”

I could feel myself flush. “She generally wears it hidden, as today,” Charles said, coming to my rescue. “And you’re hardly in the habit of observing such things, Benjamin.”

“Yes, but you!” Cole released me and turned to address Charles in his indignation, leaving me to hastily unclasp the chain from about my neck. “You an alchemist, and never to have noticed?”

Charles shrugged. “I thought it was a pretty silver trinket, no more. I’ve seen the pictures inside.”

“The pictures are irrelevant. And it is not silver.” I offered the chain to him and he held up the little key, peering at it in the light. “Yes, this should be the correct size. Let me try it.”

It slid in easily and turned, the tumblers sliding within. What, I wondered, was I to make of the fact that the Headmistress, without my knowledge, had presented me with the key to this secret chamber? I had known that she trusted me, perhaps as far as she trusted any living soul, but this was far beyond a confidential secretary’s prerogative.

And then the door slid open, and all such thoughts fled from me. For the room within was terribly familiar: the furnace and the bellows, the piles of books and the shelves of alembics and retorts. As far as I could tell, the Headmistress’s private room was a fully-equipped alchemical laboratory.


	11. Chapter 11

“Then Mrs. Sheldon…” Charles began uncertainly – not because there was any ambiguity in what we were seeing, but because it was so difficult to credit.

“We should have known it before.” Benjamin Cole strode to pull open the window-shutters, flooding the room with dull afternoon light. “The alchemical contamination _had_ to be local, to have created the size of monster it did. And the location here would have been ideal for her, so near the dyeworks and the mining district.”

“But she couldn’t have been an alchemist,” I said. Hardly aware of what I was doing, I picked up one of finely-blown glass vessels and cradled it within my palm: so fragile, as I knew from witnessing dozens of laboratory explosions in Haven. “With the running of the school – she simply wouldn’t have had the time.”

“Ah, but that was why she needed you, Miss Bannister. That was why she began training you as her secretary – what was it, seven years ago? I imagine that period coincided with the rise of her alchemical career.” He was flipping through the notebooks and papers left on the counters as he spoke, his brow deeply furrowed.

“The Worm,” Charles said heavily – for someone had to cut to the bleeding heart of the matter, and Benjamin was too occupied to backtrack for my sake. “She would have believed herself responsible for it, of course. And so she was willing to die to make amends.”

I realised that I was near to crushing the alembic and hurriedly set it down, grateful for the arm Charles put around my shoulders. When I was a girl, I had found the Headmistress’s sense of justice nearly inhuman – she tolerated no deviation and listened to no excuses. I should have known how readily she would turn that same judgment upon herself.

“Mrs. Sheldon was a woman of remarkable character,” Cole said, without looking up from the documents. “And remarkable abilities, it seems, for one not professionally trained.”

“Neither were you, for that matter,” Charles noted.

“True, but I had always fancied myself an exception... Ha, there!” he cried, pulling out a folio and opening it out across the desk. A stack of letters, old and crinkled with use, was folded within the front cover. “I doubt they will be love letters.” Cole glanced up at us. “Have we any moral objection to handling a deceased woman’s correspondence, in the name of science?”

“She gave me the key,” I said hesitantly. “And she always did foresee… eventualities.”

I wondered if he would have listened to me, had I expressed any reservations – he opened the letters readily enough, the three of us crowding around the desk.

The first of them were dated to seven years ago. I had been writing and copying most of her correspondence since that time, but they were not in my hand – although they _were_ copies of sent letters, the headings marked in her usual business-like fashion, missing only the intended address. The writing was the Headmistress’s slanted and spidery script, seemingly reluctant to accommodate the demands of the Eastern alphabet, but spaced perfectly and unmarred by erasures – we had no trouble making out the words, though the meaning was obscure:

_Dear Sir_ , she wrote. _I have begun my experiments as instructed by authority, washing the moon’s face with Azoth before proceeding with the rest of the process…I find, however, that the flight of the crows is not sufficiently high…_

It went on for several pages in this vein, before concluding:

_I would be very glad of your continuing assistance in this matter, working always towards our stated goals in the service of our principals. Since_ _they have not yet deigned to communicate with me directly, please convey to them the sum of my efforts and the continuing loyalty of_

_yours sincerely,_

_Laura Elissa Sheldon_.

“I’m afraid I understood very little of that,” I confessed, having reached the end of the first letter.

“It’s only the old mystical language,” Cole said dismissively. “You’ve already heard it used by Michael Haywood: a great deal of high-sounding obscurantist terms for really very simple processes. The puffers – for such we must assume the Headmistress to have been, in her wat – generally tend to favour it, for it makes them feel secretive and important. But the real question here...” he added, as he turned over more pages.

“Is to whom she was writing,” Charles put in.

“Precisely. And I’m beginning to be very much afraid… Ah, here.” He held up another sheet to the light, peering at it with a frown. “It’s in a cipher.”

“Can you break it?” Charles asked.

“I don’t need to; I know the technique quite well. Can you find me a copy of _The Garden of Hermes_ , please? She was sure to have one.” Charles handed him the book after a brief search, and Cole retreated with it and the letter to the room’s single wooden chair, throwing himself into it as though he were in his own sitting-room. Only someone who knew him well, as I was beginning to, could have picked up on the tension in those casually sprawled limbs.

_“My dear madam_ ,” Benjamin Cole began to read out after a moment, hesitating only slightly as he translated the code. “ _Your grasp of theory appears to me sound, but I fear I cannot say the same for your laboratory process._ Then it is all quite basic instruction; I’ll pass over it. But here, toward the end: _I recommend that you do not take the sages literally in attempting your search for the universal solvent. Some_ aqua fortis _will be just as efficacious at this early stage. You want your Luna pure and chaste before it can be impregnated with the first material of the Great Magisterium._

_I have conveyed your regards to our principals. Pray keep me abreast of your further progress and any difficulties you may encounter. It remains an honour to instruct such an able pupil for_

_your humble servant,_

_Francis Mortimer.”_

It was uncanny. As he read, I noticed a change in Cole’s voice – in his very posture and aspect – that reminded me of his sudden transformation back in the somnifer den, as he had issued orders to Michael Haywood. No longer sprawling, he sat up in the chair with his head high and his legs crossed at the knee, his tone uncharacteristically unctuous as he read out the sentence about Luna pure and chaste.

I was so occupied with observing this process that I almost missed the name at the end, which Cole read very softly. But Charles caught it at once. “Mortimer!” he exclaimed. “So you were right to think he was involved.”

“Oh, more than simply involved,” Benjamin said. He slumped back, rubbing the bridge of his nose, the paper held loosely in his hand. “I knew that the Navy Yard’s Tincture had to be based on his work. But I had no idea that he had enlisted outside assistance in assembling the _prima materia._ ”

“Sophic mercury, sophic sulphur, and magnesia salt,” Charles supplied: the three materials Cole had spoken of, last night by the sea.

He nodded. “All gathered in the Vase of Hermes to hatch the Philosopher’s Egg. He had been working on sophic sulphur for as long I’d known him: it was he who invented the modern phlogiston lamp, though this is not now widely spoken of. Mrs. Sheldon – about a year ago, I should imagine – managed to arrive at sophic mercury. A very apt division of labour, symbolically speaking – as the puffers would have it, they represents the male and the female parts of the mystic marriage.”

“That lock,” Charles breathed, while I was still absorbing all this. “And Phoebe’s necklace. You really think they’re made of…” I handed the locket to him without being asked, watching him touch it reverently. The last time he had done that, I had been wearing it; his expression now was nearly the same.

“I thought,” I said tentatively, recalling the science lessons of my schooldays, “that mercury could not be used to craft a solid object – not unless it was terribly cold.”

“The metal we call quicksilver cannot,” Charles explained, without looking up from the locket. “But sophic mercury is the quintessence of quicksilver, and it is fixed in state, just as gold is.”

“The dragon without wings,” Cole murmured, and then he sat forward impatiently, his elbows on his knees. “It is an unprecedented achievement, to be sure, but what is even more unprecedented here are these blasted letters. Charles, tell me, have you ever seen the like?”

“The correspondence, yes, I see what you mean,” he said, frowning. “Unless he took her on as an apprentice…”

“In which case she would have been sharing his laboratory, as I did, rather than writing back and forth. No, this is something else altogether.” He spoke aside to me, with a rueful twist to his mouth: “Alchemists are a secretive lot, Miss Bannister, and do not readily share their secrets. Apart from formal training at a place like Redstone, the esoteric knowledge of our craft may only be passed down to a chosen apprentice, or shared in a partnership such as ours, or recorded partially and in cipher. Those who publish Hermetic texts nowadays seldom have much of value to tell. But for two unrelated alchemists to consult as frankly as this… Well. It is truly little wonder that, between them, they arrived so quickly at the materials for the Tincture.”

“Amazing what a bit of openness can accomplish,” I said, my voice too tremulous to be dry. Seven years – I suppose for an alchemist that was very rapid. “Tell me, why does your profession not usually operate like this?”

“The glamour of it,” Charles said, spreading his hands open before him. “The mystery. I fear we are too attached to them.”

“And on the other side, the danger. From both free exchange and haste.” Cole uncoiled himself from the chair, beginning once more to pace about the room. “Let us not forget that the result of this…unprecedented cooperation was a man-eating slug and an extremely volatile substance that the Generality means to use as a weapon.”

Here, I felt on slightly firmer ground. “These ‘principals’ they mention. Might they both have been working for the Government? Although, you said that Mortimer…”

“He sold to either side, yes, but I doubt that your Headmistress would have consented to do so. No, it was only the Generality who had all of their work on the _prima materia_ , and prepared the Tincture from it. They took Mortimer’s first, when he was executed; Mrs. Sheldon remained a loyal servant, and delivered her own results sometime last year.”

“A loyal servant,” I repeated quietly, in realisation. “She was trying to prove her loyalty all of her life, to a country that would never fully accept her. No, she would not have sold to both sides. If she turned to alchemy at all, it was out of despair of all the more ordinary channels open to her.”

“It takes all kinds of fanatics to build a weapon,” Cole said savagely, cutting across me.

“I wish you wouldn’t speak like that, sir. Not here, not now. She was one of your own—”

“She was _not_!” There was an angry flush high on his cheekbones. “I have nothing but respect for Mrs. Sheldon’s alchemical skill, but I claim no kinship with one who would prostitute her science to the butchers.”

“Perhaps we are being unjust to her,” Charles said – more mildly than I expected, considering that he had once been the target of a similar insult. “She arranged for her laboratory not to fall into their hands, after all; she must have installed that lock shortly after perfecting the sophic mercury. I wonder if she already suspected what they might do with it?”

“Or perhaps it was simply a resurgence of the secretive alchemist’s instinct, in an already secretive woman.” Cole shrugged, as if he did not think it made much difference, and went back to reading through the letters.

She had given the key to me, I thought, trying to reason it out clearly, long before she could have known that I’d marry an alchemist. What would she have wanted me to do with it?

And then I knew, or at least suspected. She would have written me a letter to be delivered after her death, and – because I had married and left Feversham, because she had sent it to my old guardians’ address and they were away on one of their missionary tours, for any number of reasons – I had not yet received it. But I suspected what it might say.

The Headmistress would not have burned her own work – there was always the chance, after all, that she might live. But she would have asked me to do so; my last duty as her secretary.She was unable to foresee every eventuality, after all.  

“She never wanted to be known publicly as an alchemist,” I said. “Her mother was already called a New Carthaginian witch. She would have wished her involvement to be kept secret – she trusted me to make sure of that. You will not break that trust?”

“I doubt it will be necessary,” Cole said, which was not entirely reassuring. “But the real question is, what are we to do now that we have ascertained this? It is gratifying to me to have my instincts proven right, but the Generality still has the Tincture and we are all still potential outlaws. If they are not to be published, these letters must be made to serve us somehow.”

He turned back to the desk, sorting through notebooks and papers. “Come and help me, Charles. These records cover years: there may be more here than we have yet found.”

I left them to it, going to sit in the chair by the bare fireplace. Despite my familiarity with the Headmistress’s methods, I doubted that I could be of much use – I lacked their specialist training, and even the unciphered letters had been hard enough for me to understand.

It was cold in the long-unheated room. I huddled in my coat and watched the grey light beyond the leaded window, thinking aimlessly. From time to time, Charles and Benjamin would confer in quiet voices: it was comforting to hear them work, and to suppose, however naively, that they would make it all come right between them. It was so long since I had last had that sort of confidence, and if I did not truly have it now, yet I might still pretend for a while.

I felt warm suddenly, and looked instinctively to the empty hearth before I realized that the source of the heat was contained in my left coat pocket.

I pulled out the piece of alchemical paper and unfolded it, read the message glowing inside. Then I tilted my head back and took a single deep, shuddering breath. In the events of the past several days, I seemed to have lost my capacity for surprise or horror.

“Phoebe?” Charles asked, looking over at me.

“It’s from my sister-in-law, Meg,” I said, holding the paper steady in my hands. “She writes that their house is surrounded, and that James has been taken away by officers of the Crown.”


	12. Chapter 12

I remember Charles holding my hand, asking “What shall we do?” while Cole gathered the Headmistress’s papers into bundles and stowed them in his bag. I never doubted that they would both try their utmost to help my brother, who had been unpleasant and supercilious to them. Only I did not know how it was ever to be accomplished.

“He has influential clients,” I ventured. “Perhaps some of them might be persuaded to intercede?”

“We have a few influential clients ourselves,” Cole said grimly, “who would not lift a finger if either of us were to be arrested. You said it was the Crown, and not the Haven Constabulary?” Meg’s note, hastily-written as it had been, was clear on that point. He shook his head. “And Charles’s army friends will not serve us here – it would be more than their career is worth, if the Generality has him. No, I fear we have no legitimate recourse left in this matter.”

But he has _done nothing_ , I wanted to cry. The whole of James’s life had been devoted to doing nothing that might earn him such a fate. He believed in the just rule of law, or at least he professed to, and in the safety of the innocent, and so he constructed innocence around him like a shield. The only flaw in that armour was his sister, I thought, flooded with guilt.

They had captured James solely to threaten us. I did not need Cole to tell me that.

“If we fail to come forward,” Charles was murmuring, thinking aloud. “But no, of course they would never release him then – the Generality has prison cells to spare. Perhaps if we…”

I knew what he would propose, my dear noble Charles, and I pressed his hand hard before he could voice it. “I shall never allow that,” I said. “I would sooner—”

“I said we had no legitimate recourse,” Cole interrupted. He fastened the straps on his bag and straightened, standing lean and tall in the centre of the room. “The illegitimate ones remain open, however.”

“Explain,” Charles said, sharp as a battlefield command.

Benjamin looked down, avoiding his eyes, but when he spoke he sounded more defiant than apologetic. “I am afraid,” he began, “that I have a number of radical and free-thinking – in the general, as well as the religious sense – correspondents across the Empire. I am sorry to have concealed this from you, Charles. I had always hoped that these associations would not reflect poorly upon you, but it seems too late for that now.”

Charles rose, approached him and touched his shoulder lightly. He looked up in surprise. “Of course I do not blame you.”

“After Mortimer,” Cole began, with sudden volubility, “I could not simply remain silent. I had to act, had to find something I might do to resist this unjust government. I thought I might go mad, else. And then, before I had fairly got started, you came along, Charles – fresh out of the Army, still shining with patriotic zeal. It wasn’t that I did not trust your discretion, you must believe me, but I could not tarnish that faith. Not when you had saved me, in so many ways.”

Now it was I who could not bear to look. I turned my head away, blinking rapidly.

“Well, it’s been tarnished now,” Charles said quietly, “for good or ill. I should like to meet your friends – certainly the ones you think might help us now, but all of them, one day. I may not agree with the entirety of their arguments, but I would like to hear them. Any position that has Phoebe’s support and yours cannot be utterly without merit. If not for my own hurt pride, I might have seen that before.”

I had hoped he had forgotten all I said that long-ago-seeming night, for I had not wished to give him pain, but I should have known better. Charles was anything but a fool; his blindspots, although I knew that they existed, lay in another direction entirely.

His hand was still on Cole’s shoulder, and I saw Cole try to shrug it off unobtrusively. I remembered them being far easier with each other, the first time they had come to Feversham – the guiding palm at the elbow or back, the effortless coordination in the laboratory – but now Benjamin leaned away from every touch.

“I am very glad, my dear fellow,” he said, however, with every appearance of sincerity. “I hope that we shall have the chance. But at this juncture, I fear no time is to be lost. There’s a man I know who lives near the hamlet of Parkdale, not far from here.” He picked up his hat from the table. “Miss Bannister, do you think the groundskeeper might loan us the use of a cart?”

“I’ll persuade him,” I promised. I knew better than to ask for any further details: we’d hear them when Cole was ready to tell us.

He seemed to think for a moment, and then he put his hat down again and pulled a chair up to the table. “Bear with me for a moment longer, please. It has just occurred to me that there is something I must do.”

“What do you need?” Charles asked at once.

“Pen and ink and paper, and some quiet. Thank you.”

He wrote for perhaps a quarter of an hour, the nib scratching furiously across the paper. It seemed much longer to me: the clock on the mantelpiece had stopped. Beside it stood an old framed silverprint of a woman in an elaborate veiled headdress, a row of coins over her heavy dark brows. Her eyes were dark also, not grey, but the look in them was familiar even in the faded picture.

At last Cole finished, folded and sealed what he had written, and put it with the other papers in his bag. We locked the door to the Headmistress’s room carefully behind ourselves, leaving the dust to settle back onto its books and glass vessels.

*

The sun had set on the late autumn day by the time we reached Parkdale in Patrick’s pony trap. Cole drove carefully down the hamlet’s single dirt road, the lantern swinging before us, the house windows (perhaps a dozen in all) each a separate square of light. As we made our slow way between them, I could see figures moving behind the windows: preparing their supper by the stove or working at a trade. I had a painful longing to join them, to be safe and warm behind stone walls.

Our destination lay on the far side of the little village. I hardly saw it at first, except as an added layer of darkness against the evening sky; it was only when we were quite close that it resolved itself into a barn, dim shafts of light escaping here and there between the boards.

“My friend lives here,” Cole said: practically the first words spoken on our journey. “I trust I need hardly swear the two of you to secrecy.”

He knocked at the barn door: two brief taps, then a pause, and a third. After a moment, the window opened to show a rough-looking, thick-set man of middle years peering out at us. When he recognized Benjamin in the fitful light of the lantern, his stubbled face relaxed a fraction.

“Why, Cole, I didn’t expect to see you at this time of night! Could you no’ have written?” He had great old-fashioned side-whiskers and a broad country accent, with no affectation of refinement; he addressed Benjamin Cole as a friendly acquaintance and an equal.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Jewkes,” said Cole, “but we have something of an emergency of our hands. You were our closest chance of help.”

I heard a key moving in the lock, and then the door opened wide to give us entrance. I had never spent much time in barns, but this one seemed to be a typical example of its kind: the roof vanishing into the shadows and the floor strewn with hay. Only one end of it had been outfitted as kind of living quarters, with a cot, spirit stove, and a few crates to serve for chairs and table. It was very warm inside after the biting autumn night, golden and surprisingly welcoming in the lamplight.

“Friends of yours?” Jewkes asked guardedly, as he motioned us in.

Cole introduced us. “Charles Templer, my partner in alchemy, and his wife, Phoebe Bannister. Dr. Bannister’s daughter.” He shot me a brief glance, in which I thought there was an apology. Certainly I winced in habitual fear as he said it, even as I understood the need to establish our credentials with Cole’s free-thinking associates. It was humbling, to think that my father’s name still held meaning in such circles. “And this is Henry Jewkes, formerly a Major in the Colonial Army.”

“Very formerly,” Jewkes appended with a scowl. Cole hadn’t quite got the knack of social introductions, I thought, a little giddy with exhaustion, although negotiating such a meeting might have been beyond even the most practiced New Town matron.

Jewkes retreated back to his makeshift chair, and I noticed that he was limping heavily, his left leg twisted and dragging. He put a pot of stew to warm on the spirit stove while Cole and Charles settled the pony and cart for the night, and then handed around bowls with chunks of brown bread. Only after we were all seated within the circle of light did he resume the conversation.

“The Haven papers arrived an hour or two back,” Jewkes said in his gruff, abrupt way. “I reckon that’s why you’re here?”

Cole shook his head, looking lost, and it was then that I knew he truly trusted this man, to be comfortable betraying ignorance in his presence. “We’ve not seen the papers for... It must be two days now.” Yes, I remembered: we had been otherwise occupied that morning, and the day before he and Charles had been arguing and no one was in a mood for news at breakfast. “What has happened?”

By way of answer, Jewkes reached behind his seat and drew out a bundle of newspapers – every one of the capital’s major publications, and a few more besides. Cole glanced over them quickly and then held one up for us to see.

_REPORTS OF WALLED CITY SIEGE EXAGGERATED,_ the headline screamed in bold black letters. _As cost of war rises, demands for a Parliamentary election…_

“And that’s only the _Haven Courant_. Our own _Chronicle_ is mincing no words, let me tell you.”

“Dear God,” Cole murmured, “no wonder they are running scared. The _Courant_ is the New Town paper – if there is anti-Generality feeling brewing there, then no Elixir will be enough to save them.”

“It’s the blockade,” Jewkes said, shrugging over his stew. Only a gleam in his eyes betrayed his own feelings on the matter. “Merchants don’t like a blockade. And with the Arsenal making all the Generals need, the war holds no immediate profit for them – not until it’s won. Which it won’t be in this lifetime. We who’ve been there, _we_ know.” He shot Charles a knowing look, and to my surprise, Charles nodded. If in his heart he had known the New Carthaginian campaign to be unwinnable, even as he fought and watched his friends die there, it was no wonder the memory of it pained him as it did. 

“Does this change our own plans?” Charles asked Benjamin quietly. He did not mention, of course, that he had no more conception than I did of what those plans were.

Cole glanced up from the newspapers, his bowl of stew left forgotten by his feet. “Not in broad outline. The Generality will not relent simply because they are facing political pressure.” And to Jewkes’ enquiring grunt, he answered, “We have a friend in trouble, you see. That is why we have come to you.”

“One of ours, Cole?”

“No.” He laughed shortly. “Most emphatically not. But a decent man, with a young family, who can scarce afford to wait on the shifting tides of power to secure his release.” Benjamin’s face grew very grave. “Whatever happens, Jewkes, I will not compromise our association. I will take quick poison first.”

“And your companions here?” Jewkes asked – without malice, but firmly enough.

“They have been told no names but yours. But it makes no difference; it will not come to that. You must trust in my mental acuity in this matter.’

“Take care you’re not too clever by half,” Jewkes said darkly. “But you’ve not steered me wrong yet, Cole, and I owe you. What is it you need from me, apart from supper and a roof for the night?”

“Winifred,” Cole said.

Jewkes swore, and then glanced at me and muttered his excuses. “I was afeard you’d say that. You know Winnie’s not to be wasted on trifles.”

“No harm will come to her, I promise you. But we need a quick passage to Haven in the morning, and a way to secure entrance to the Palace.”

This time, even my presence was not enough to deter Jewkes from profanity. “You’ve gone mad, man!”

Cole scrubbed a hand over his face. “Quite possibly. It is the only thing I can think to do. If we are arrested, will your Winnie know to return home?”

Jewkes’s indignant face softened, into a surprisingly fond look. “Oh, she’s a clever one. I’ve been training her, out on the moors – they don’t hear well aloft, you know, so she takes signals from a mirror. She’s got a prodigious memory, Winnie. I’ll show you how to tell her what you need.”

“Thank you,” Benjamin Cole said sincerely, for this was as good as an assent to whatever mad thing it was he wanted.

I put down my empty bowl. “I hope you’ll forgive me asking, Mr. Jewkes, but who exactly _is_ Winifred?

“Ah. Well. I suppose there’s no harm showing you now, if you’re to have her.” Still he hesitated, limping about as he cleared away the dishes, and refusing my offer of help. At last, he picked up the lamp and motioned for us to follow him back into the depths of the barn.

It seemed to be mostly empty, the floor covered with old hale-bales. As we matched, Jewkes hung his lamp on a hook and began shifting the bales about. At first I could make out nothing, and then I could, like an illusionist’s stall at a fair: there was a large lizard under the hay. No. That had been only the tip of the lizard’s tail.

It lay loosely curled, the head pointing toward us – the head itself as long as I was tall, smooth and scaled in a colour between green and brown. The closed eyes were set well back, the size of dinner plates.

Instinctively I looked at Charles, who stood rigid as a statue beside me. “Is it…?” I began.

He was hardly blinking, his voice gone very flat. “A New Carthaginian dragon, yes. Jewkes, how in heaven’s name did you—”

“Took her across with me as an egg, when my conscription was out,” Jewkes said happily. “My company had captured a breeder, you see, and I had the interrogating of him. The climate here don’t suit her, but I keep her warm as I can.” I had just noticed the covered braziers set along the walls of the barn, accounting for the heat.

“Isn’t it—she—dangerous?” I asked, forcing myself not to move further back.

“Oh, lord no, ma’am. The New Carthies use them to drop fire off, true, but it’s no different than hunting dogs or horses in cavalry. There’s no harm in a cavalry-horse in peacetime, as long as you treat them respectful. And my Winnie has more intelligence than a horse – she was bred for spy work.”

I did not point out that an increase in intelligence hardly precluded a threat. Once I was grown somewhat used to the creature’s size, it did look fairly peaceful – less the ruffed, spiny dragon of a storybook illustration than an ordinary lizard grown large and airborne. Its leathery wings lay curled tightly on its back, which was quite smooth – if the species had ever had spines, they had clearly been bred away for ease of riding.

An enormous tongue flicked out, almost too quick for vision. I stumbled back into Charles, startled, but the eyes did not open.

“She’s had her supper and she’s sleeping,” Jewkes assured me. “They mostly sleep when they can, for flying wearies them – they never were meant to be as large as they are.”

“Growth assisted by alchemy,” Cole put in. He did not seem surprised, but he was observing the creature avidly; I wondered whether he had seen it before, at least at its full size. I did hope this was its full size. “On our side, all such experiments yielded were some vast and irritated bulls, a century ago.” He paused, just long enough for a breath. “Will you object to spending the night here, either of you?”

Under the circumstances, his briskness was probably a kindness. “I trust your friend’s judgment of the creature,” Charles said tightly. “Particularly since, if I understand you aright, we are to ride on its back to Haven tomorrow. But perhaps we might secure lodging for Phoebe in the village.”

“Certainly not,” I said, swallowing my apprehension as I saw that Charles had to be right. “I am amply chaperoned here, and expect no special danger from…from Winifred.”

Benjamin turned to me, while Jewkes went to heap bales over the sleeping dragon again. “You did not spare me your opinion at the Navy Yard, Miss Bannister,” he said quietly, “and you were proven right in the event. I hope that, if you have any reservations about our current plan, you will be as forthright in sharing them.”

“Reservations!” I laughed despite myself. “I think it is perfectly absurd. Single-handedly storming the Generality to rescue my imprisoned brother, on the back of an illegal dragon named Winnie? It is like something out of Charles’s adventure novels. Yet if we have any other options, I cannot see them.”

I wanted so badly to thank them both, for all that they were risking for me – for the sake of a man who had never shown them any kindness. But I knew they would never accept my thanks.

“I appreciate your confidence,” Benjamin Cole said, and I thought that he smiled. “But in actual fact, it is the Royal Palace we shall be storming.”


	13. Chapter 13

We made our bed on blankets spread over the straw, between the braziers and the sleeping bulk of Winifred, whose heartbeat I fancied I could feel vibrating through the ground.

I had spent the previous night cold and fearful, much alone despite Cole’s presence in the cell beside me. Now I was warmer though fearful still, for myself and for all those dear to me; yet with Charles’s arm holding me close, I felt secure enough to doze.

Cole stayed up late, talking with Jewkes by the stove – I could hear the rustling of the newspapers and see the flash of a hand-mirror through my closed eyelids, as Jewkes taught him how to signal to the dragon. At last they separated and Benjamin came to curl up five feet away from us, his lean frame folded very small; and I drifted into a deeper sleep to the companionable sound of his breathing.

We were up long before the tardy dawn, breakfasting on coffee and slightly stale digestive biscuits. I wrote a reassuring note to Meg on the alchemical paper, imagining her helpless worry as she remained a prisoner within her own house, and then re-pinned my hair using Jewkes’ mirror and brushed out the worst of the wrinkles and straw from my skirts. Cole gave Jewkes a packet of papers, including those we had taken from the Headmistress’s laboratory, with instructions for their future disposal. And then it was time for us to leave.

Once out in the field beneath the greying sky, I approached the dragon carefully. Her scales felt dry and cool as any serpent’s under my palm, and she did not sidle or shy as a horse might. The eyes, open now, gleamed gold in the dim light...with intelligence, I thought, though one could not be sure.

Jewkes had rigged up a kind of leather harness, but it was a flimsy thing to have between ourselves and the open air. By unspoken agreement, Charles and Benjamin arranged that I was to sit between them – Cole at the makeshift reins and Charles at the back. We had abandoned all our small luggage apart from Cole’s carpet-bag, strapped on behind us.

Charles gave me a hand up as the dragon rose to its short legs. Its back was flat and broad, awkward to sit on side-saddle. I was grateful for Charles’s grip around my waist, but held on to Cole rather more cautiously – he was rigid with tension, until I almost fancied that I could see the muscles twitching beneath his tweeds.

To my surprise, he took my gloved hands in his and drew them closer. “Take care, Miss Bannister.”

Jewkes was hovering about us anxiously: as solicitous for the dragon’s welfare, I thought, as for our own. “It will be bitter cold up there, at this season. She won’t take it for long, she isn’t bred to it.”

“We won’t overtax her,” Cole promised, and I added, “We are all very grateful for your assistance, Mr. Jewkes.”

“Aye, well,” he said gruffly. “I still think you’re all stark raving.”

None of us could argue with that assessment. Cole flashed the signal to Winifred, and she gave a great heave and a running leap, and carried us up into the sky.

*

It was an altogether novel sensation, as exhilarating as it was terrifying. The wind stung my face like a slap as the ground dropped away below us, until I could hardly see for tears: I blinked them away and at last was forced to blot my eyes on Cole’s shoulder. The dragon’s leathery wings beat hard on either side, pushing through the air like oars as we flew.

I looked down and my head spun – I could hardly recognise the familiar countryside, laid out as in a drawing and moving impossibly fast. It was still too early for anyone to notice our passage, through in a farmhouse here and there I saw a light, as someone rose early for bread-baking or milking. A whole world below, and we watching it like gods at a play. How, I asked myself, could the New Carthaginians give weapons to men who regularly felt such power?

We could not speak, with the wind whipping at us, but I felt that we shared the experience in mute communion. There was no fear left in me. Of course, I did not wish to plummet to my death; but I had realised at last that all life was this: a perilous flight over a deadly precipice, as glorious and as fragile, and worth every moment.

The sun rose behind us while the darkness ahead lightened slowly, my only sign of the passage of time. At last – it can have been little more than an hour – the landscape below assumed a more urban character.

Here, we began to be observed by early morning workers. I saw people – small as insects below – stop and point upward, and distantly a fire-bell began to ring. Cole commanded the dragon to fly higher, until we were hidden in the lowering clouds, but that left us blind to our progress. The surrounding fog was bitterly cold, soaking through my clothes, wracking shivers through limbs already numbed by the wind.

Cole steered south and west by his compass, but it was not long before we were forced to descend again. As the cloud cleared from around us, I saw that we were directly above the city centre – the tops of the theatres and the banks and the Government buildings loomed nearer than I had expected, arranged in their orderly lines. If I turned the other way and peered close, I might see our own house, where our own sitting-room would be waiting.

Yet it was no Haven for us any longer. It never truly had been.

Beyond lay the sea, a shifting pewter-grey. For a moment, I thought of asking Cole to keep us flying westward, away from Haven and from all its ills, somewhere where we might live safe and free. But even if I could have left my brother behind, I knew that there was no such place.

We banked toward the Royal Palace, which lay at the heart of the Government – a rectangle following the shape of an old fort, though refurbished in modern times. As we neared, I saw the cannon on the walls turn their black mouths toward us, and my heart leapt into my throat.

“They won’t fire,” Cole shouted, his voice ripped away by the wind.

I could only hope that he was right. The cannon swung to follow as we flew into the Palace courtyard, but none of them spoke. Winifred landed just beside the enormous mythological fountain at the centre of the court, left dry and mildewed at this season; we slid off her back and then Cole flashed his mirror and she flew off again, rising up into the sky until she was a mere speck against the clouds, retreating.

“We demand a royal audience,” Cole said, to the guards who came running up to meet us. And to my eternal amazement, it only required a little further negotiation before one was granted.

*

We had to wait some time, under watch, for it was still very early by court standards. They had searched us all for weapons, although Cole was protective of his carpet-bag: “If I had wished to commit assassination with explosives,” he muttered, as the guards looked through it, “I might as easily have done so from the air.” Oddly enough, they did not seem to find this reassuring.

That hour of anxious uncertainty, spent in a plush red chair in a windowless ante-chamber, was certainly among the worst of my life. Among all my fears, I found myself worrying that Winifred might catch a chill, flying in circles above us. She was so alone, and so far from home.

At last the wide doors opened and we were shown inside, ushered as something in between guests and prisoners.

It was a smaller chamber than I had expected: not the formal state halls in the newer parts of the Palace, which one saw depicted in newspaper reports of balls and embassies, but a relatively simple reception room, twice as long as it was wide, with a minimum of mirrors and gilding. The phlogiston chandeliers shone bright, but the windows were draped in heavy curtains: one could not tell if it was day or night outside, or if perhaps they had been bricked shut. A parquetry walkway led through the room, and a throne stood at the far end.

And there, before us, was the King – sole ruler of all the Middle Kingdoms, Prince of the North, would-be Emperor of New Carthage.

I remembered hearing about his coronation as the Child Emperor, fifteen years earlier. The adults around me (for this had been just before I was sent away to school, while I stayed with my parents’ executors) had busily discussed the political consequences of the old King’s death and the Generals who would now act as regents, the effect this would have on the rights of Free-Thinkers in the provinces and at home. But I, so recently orphaned myself, had looked at the pictures of the grave-faced little boy wearing the crown and ermine, and pitied him.

He had grown since then, of course: he must have been in his early twenties. He was slight and of medium height; had a long nose and a neatly-trimmed dark beard (likely grown to hide the hereditary weak chin), and was dressed in the simple dark blue of military uniform, a few medals pinned to his breast. If he did not sit on the throne, I might not have known him for the King at all. Or perhaps I would have, for there is a look that people have, when for their whole lives they have felt themselves the object of public scrutiny.

Another man stood next to him, whom I took longer to recognise – older, greying, solidly-built, also in uniform and with an old-fashioned military moustache. This was Theophilius Avery, former Governor of the New Carthage colonies and one of the most senior members of the Generality. He stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, examining us narrowly.

I glanced at two men beside me: confronted with these symbols of the realm, Charles was painfully pale, Benjamin tight-lipped. As we moved forward slowly, down the length of the room, I wondered what I ought to do – bow, curtsy, prostrate myself? It was not a situation covered in my deportment classes at Feversham.

Then the guard hit his staff against the parquet and announced, “Mr. Benjamin Cole, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Templer!” before backing out and shutting the door behind him. The gentlemen bowed; I performed my deepest reverence, conscious of my wind-blown and unfashionable state: I had unpinned my battered hat in the waiting room, but my hair was beyond help, and I still had bits of straw caught in my skirt and mud encrusting my boots. I knew, of course, that no amount of combs and brushes would have let me pass for a gentlewoman.

“Your Majesty,” Benjamin Cole said in an everyday but carrying tone, “General Avery. I hope you’ll forgive the sudden intrusion.”

Avery gave a bark of dry laughter. “Sudden intrusion, sir? You came upon us with a dragon! You’re bloody fortunate we did not shoot you down directly.”

Cole nodded, with seeming deference. “You could not risk damaging the beast, of course. Not when it might still be captured. Only one more, and you could have a breeding pair.”

Avery’s mouth thinned beneath his moustache. “You’ve made your point, you goddamned blackmailer. What do you want?”

“Pardon me, sir,” Cole continued smoothly, “but I have _not_ yet made my point. Winifred – that is the dragon’s name, if you please – is currently flying about the Government buildings and the Arsenal, above the range of your greatest cannon. She has upon her some of my most explosive alchemical preparations. If you do not comply with my requests – if you threaten any harm to me or to my companions – then she will begin to drop them. First on the Arsenal – on _one_ structure in the Arsenal, in the particular. Then on the houses of the Generality. And finally, here.”

Beside me, I felt Charles hold himself very still, and tried to school my own face to give nothing away. I snuck a look at Cole – his back straight, his eyes narrow and glittering. A day’s growth of beard made him seem more dangerous, but his bearing kept the danger ruthlessly controlled. He was the most notorious alchemist in Haven. Surely they had no way to suspect that he was bluffing?

After his initial outburst, the General’s expression was unreadable. “And your requests being?”

“That you release Miss Bannister’s brother: he has done nothing to be blamed for, after all; you captured him to get to us and now you have us. I demand also that you cease the creation of the so-called Philosopher’s Stone, and allow me to oversee its destruction. It is uncontrollable and enormously risky, sir, you have no idea of the damage it could do—”

“Oh, but we do.” The General smiled like a tomcat within his whiskers. “After the accidents that befell Warner and Featherstonehaugh, you see, we realised that our initial plans for the Stone were flawed. We had hoped to use it to create weapons for our army – then we saw that in itself it _was_ a weapon. A subtle poison, easily spread and unpredictable in its effects… Once the first shipment reaches New Carthage, we shall have the Walled City taken within a fortnight, and all this recent unpleasantness at end.”

There was a little silence. I knew, with an awareness I couldn’t have explained, that both my companions were utterly furious: Benjamin at the misuse of his art, and Charles at the actions of the military government for which he had risked his life.

“Now that, of course,” Cole said, “would depend on possessing the element of surprise. And if our demands are not met or our safety is compromised, a full record of everything we have discovered about the Tincture shall very rapidly find its way to New Carthage.”

“Including the fact that its effects on the human body may be counteracted by essence of lunary,” Charles put in, a flush high across his cheekbones.

“Old wives’ tales,” scoffed Avery.

“Alchemy,” Cole corrected him. “And rest assured, even if we do not tell them, the New Carthaginians shall soon find it out. They’ll probably improve on Templer’s solution. The science is far more advanced among them, after all.”

“You are very bold,” the King noted, from his throne. It was the first time he had spoken: he had a light tenor, and seemed more diverted than anything by the proceedings. I wondered if Cole had counted on the drama of our appearance to intrigue him, guaranteeing us this audience.

“Sire,” I said to him, curtsying again, and wishing that I could look tragically pale rather than wind-stung as a fishwife, “forgive us, but my brother’s freedom is at stake. The two of us are orphans: he is my only relative living.”

“I see.” He tapped his manicured fingers on the arm of the throne. “Well, can’t we release the chap, Avery?”

The General and Benjamin were still locked in their battle of wills; Avery did not look away from him to reply. “Dr. Bannister has managed to oversee all the Stone-related fatalities, Sire. That makes his silence vital for the security of the Empire.”

“But James doesn’t know anything about the Tincture,” I said, a little frantically. “He distrusts alchemists in any case.”

They paid me no heed. “Those _were_ accidents, then?” Benjamin asked. “I suspected that perhaps you were removing witnesses, or had leaked it into the water.”

“Oh no, no,” Avery said, with another smile. “The deaths the good doctor brought to you were merely unfortunate accidents. The substance was not believed to be dangerous, at first, and its lure was irresistible. I believe some fools even put it into their food, in hopes of becoming immortal.”

He paused, resting his hands over the  paunch covered by his uniform jacket. “As for the three of you... Let us say that I do not accede to your amateur attempts at blackmail. Let us say that I trust in our army’s ability to intercept a single unmanned dragon, and our navy’s to stop your treasonous missive from reaching the Walled City. Let us that I have all of you clapped in irons, and four stakes erected in Imperial Square tomorrow.”

He sounded so mild that it took me a moment to understand what he was saying, and then my knees nearly turned to water. Cole had miscalculated, then: we had gambled everything and lost.

Benjamin’s lips were pressed into a line, nostrils flaring. He had barely composed himself to speak when – before anyone could prevent him – Charles dove down to reach the carpetbag, drew out a cloth-wrapped rectangle, and held it aloft. The action must have jarred his cold-stiffened leg, but he did not show it: he looked, in that moment, like a statue of a heroic soldier.

“In that case,” my husband said, quite calmly, though his breath was coming fast, “I will have to drop this.”

The guards surrounding the throne had lifted their weapons when he first moved, and they were all still trained upon him. The King sat forward in lively interest; General Avery did not stir at all. “And what may that be?” he asked, in tones of gently enquiry. “Another threat to the Throne?”

“It is the Speculum: the famous mystery of specular stone, through which one may see forward and backward in time. I imagine _that_ ability could prove useful for your war effort. But my partner is the only one who knows the secret to its preparation, and this is the only existing sample.”

It was, I saw, the hand-mirror that Jewkes had given us for signalling the dragon – the slabs of obsidian on which Cole had been fruitlessly experimenting remained wrapped safely at the bottom of the bag. Yet surely the General could not know as much.

It seemed, however, that he did. For after a surprised moment, General Avery threw his head back and laughed, full and hearty. “I admire your courage, Mr. Templer,” he said, once he had breath enough to speak. “What is that, a shaving glass? I know very well, you see, that the mythical Speculum does not exist. In fact, I believe that you yourself have described its achievement as impossible.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Charles demanded. “I’ve never said as much except—” Except to me, in the privacy of our parlour.

“The secret to intelligence-gathering,” Avery said, “is that people never do notice their servants. Your fair-haired maid, Edith Vogel, has been in our employ for some time. We need, you see, to close keep an eye on potential dissidents. Times being what they are.”

A mix of emotions crossed Benjamin’s face at this information, triumph and indignation. He had been far too careful to conduct any of his most secret business where Edith – or Charles and I, for that matter – might have known of it.

I, on the other hand, was remembering Edith’s haggard, sunken-eyed look when last I saw her, her guilty flitting from room to room. “Then it was she who poisoned Charles,” I said.

Avery shrugged. “The poison was meant to deter Mssrs. Cole and Templer from the investigation. I did not approve of it myself, but my subordinates can be...somewhat overzealous.”

It might have killed all three of us, if we had had more appetite that night. Would Edith have spared me, I wondered? But I could hardly imagine that terrified girl as a murderess at all. “You threatened her family. You must have.”

He waved a hand. “These Northerners, you know. They are primitive, superstitious, easily frightened. I would not trust one very far, of course, but it makes them useful tools.”

“And dedicated rebels,” Cole said, between his teeth.

“Do you say so?” Avery asked, with an appearance of interest. But he seemed to have tired of the game, for he put his hands behind his back and added, his demeanour instantly changing, “Now, let us have no more of these grand gestures and heroics. I wish to speak to Mr. Cole – seriously, as gentleman to gentleman, and alone. If you have no objection, Sire?”

It had already become clear that the King’s objections were not material here. I had lost whatever hope I might have had of a benevolent emperor coming to our rescue.

“This way then, Cole,” Avery said briskly, gesturing him to a door at the far end of the throne room.

Benjamin looked between us and him for an indecisive moment, as though he feared that we might be clapped in irons the moment he turned his back. Perhaps he was right to fear it, but I saw no purpose is denying the General.

I stepped forward, willing myself to sound cheerful and firm. “If you are longer than an hour,” I said, “then we are certainly coming to find you.”

Benjamin’s blue eyes met mine in sharp regard, before creasing in a half-smile. And then he gave an impeccable courtier’s bow, and lifted my gloved hands to his lips.

“At your service, Miss Bannister. Charles.” He tipped an invisible hat to us – he had lost his at some point during our flight – before passing through the door, leaving me standing dumbfounded behind him. I recognised that combination of lightness and sincerity: he did not think he was coming back.

We remained there for some while in silence, still standing before the throne, before Charles forgot himself enough to hit his walking-stick hard against the royal floorboards. “If only we could know what they were saying!”

“Oh, but we can,” said the King at once. He rose in obvious excitement: there was something of the Child Emperor about him still. “Come along!”

We followed him with some bemusement, as he ducked under a tapesty that hung directly behind the throne, down a dark, narrow passageway and through a small door that he unlocked. The space within was the size of a cupboard, one wall covered by a tightly-woven Carthaginian screen.

“Quietly now,” the King whispered, motioning us through. It was a close fit, with three adults in a corner more appropriate for a child, and neither Charles nor I wishing to press too close to his divinely-chosen person. If I had been properly dressed for court, we should never have managed.

“Old Theo doesn’t know this is here,” the King went on, nearly into my ear, once we were settled. “He thinks I am a fool, you see, with no spies and secrets of my own, because I have spent my whole life in the Palace. As though the Palace ever lacked for secrets.”

He seemed very eager to talk, despite his injunction, and I worried that his whispering might give us away – I could hear movement beyond the screen, alarmingly close.

If I leaned close to its rough surface I could see through almost unobstructed, although I knew – or at least hoped – that its occupants could not tell they were being observed: to them this would appear to be a mere heating grate, such as I had seen scattered about the Palace. In any case, they seemed too absorbed in gauging each other’s tempers to look much about them.

The study we observed was small but comfortable, furnished as I imagined a gentleman’s club would be, in contrast to the gilded elegance of the rest of the palace. There was a large desk set near the window, bookcases and cabinets lining the walls, and two leather armchairs standing on a rich New Carthaginian rug.

“Will you accept a drink, Mr. Cole?” General Avery was asking politely, having crossed to the decanter on the desk.

“No, thank you.”

“Allow me, then.” He poured a glass of Northern bramble whisky and leaned back against the polished golden wood at ease, the uncontested master of all he surveyed. “This is my inner sanctum of sorts – a place to conduct my affairs, on those occasions when I am required at the Palace rather than the Generality buildings. Please, take a seat.”

Cole refused that offer as well, standing with his hands joined behind his back. From our vantage-point, I could see no more than the set of his shoulders in his tweed jacket, his ear and the edge of his unshaven cheek.

“What was your purpose in summoning me here?” he demanded.

The General did not seem disconcerted by the abruptness of his tone. “I thought we might speak more productively away from the eyes of our Sovereign, and your associates.”

“Anything you say to me may be said in front of—”

“Yes, yes,” he said, with a trace of impatience. “But I am more concerned about your own reply. I do not wish for it to be...constrained.”

“I fail to understand you.”

“You will soon enough. You see, I have been observing your career with interest, Mr. Cole.” He turned around briefly, unlocked one of the desk’s many drawers with a key attached to his watch-fob, and drew out a sheet of paper. “I have here a letter which you may remember writing several years ago, addressed to the Generality. It betrays an admirable public spirit.”

Benjamin Cole reared back; if he had been less of a gentleman, I believe he might have spit upon the floor. “That isn’t all it betrays. If the priests and philosophers are right, then I may yet have to answer for the contents of that letter. But I refuse to be judged by it now, sir, and by you.”

“We’ll have no histrionics,” snapped Avery. Then his voice smoothed out once more, as suddenly as a bedsheet tugged flat. “I can see,” he continued, “that you are a very talented man. The late Mr. Mortimer always said as much. It is a pity, then, to see you wasting your talents in a back-street Old Town shop, filling orders for servants and apothecaries. Little wonder, if you have become restlessness enough to turn that prodigious mind to...other, less legally-sanctioned activities.”

“If you think that I will work for you—”

“Kindly allow me to finish. With the alchemical Tincture in hand, I expect to hear of a final victory in New Carthage at any moment.”

“That isn’t what the papers say,” Cole could not help interjecting.

Avery was unmoved in the face of provocation. “The papers are penned by ignorant hacks who have no conception of the weapons we hold in reserve. At the very least, I expect a lifting of the blockade and a reestablishment of the zones of influence we held before the last rebellion. If this occurs, I wish to know if you would consider going to New Carthage.”

I saw Benjamin’s hands tighten around each other behind his back, until the knuckles were bloodless. “As?” he bit out.

“Why, as an alchemist. You would be no under obligation to report to our governors there, or even to remain in areas controlled by our military. You would be entirely a free agent. At the very least, I think I can rely on you to be no more willing to sell your abilities to the New Carthaginian forces than to us.” And he tapped the letter folded in his breast pocket, as though he held Cole’s heart secreted there. “I am told New Carthage is a paradise for practitioners of the alchemical art, richer in both ingredients and learning. And, as you are classically-trained, I believe the language would not long be a barrier to you.”

I half-expected Cole to explain once more how little Old and New Carthaginian had in common, but he was far too preoccupied for that. I held my breath, and snuck a glance at Charles beside me: fitfully lit through the screen, he looked pale and intent, fists clenched on his knees.

This was what Cole had always wanted, after all, offered up to him for the taking. “Templer,” he began after a moment, in a choked voice. I had expected as much, but the next name he spoke surprised me: “He and Miss Bannister would never wish to go. It would be no life for them. And I cannot simply abandon...”

“Ah, but you would really be doing him a favour, you know. He is a well-regarded gentleman, with a young wife – soon a family, perhaps. Do you really think their well-being is served by being linked to a dissident, a reputed black magician – and goodness only knows what else? Your roguish ways were all very well while you were a solitary young man, Mr. Cole, but I must call it selfish of you to persist in them now.”

I nearly cried out behind the screen, biting my cheek so hard I tasted blood. The worst of it was that I could not see Benjamin’s face – could not see how he was receiving these damning, persuasive words.

“You know nothing of my association with Charles Templer,” he said at last, though it sounded almost a question. He must have been wondering, as I was, what else Edith might have told about our lives in Aurelian Street – she had been there longer than I, and it was true, gentlemen never took much notice of servants…

“Your associations do not concern me,” Avery said dismissively, taking another sip of whisky. He tilted the glass up and admired the colour: dark purple with glints of crimson, almost like the scarf Meg had once shown us. “I thought only to appeal to your better nature. Now, will you go to New Carthage or not?”

“Is prison my alternative, or the fire?”

Avery sighed deeply, setting down the glass. “We are not the monsters you think us, Mr. Cole. Perhaps you are right that some of our methods have been…questionable. But we would very much prefer not to prosecute a person such as yourself – a gentleman of good family, a university graduate, a man of science. I have offered you a choice that would have protected your friends, and you have not taken it. Now I offer you another. If only you will give your word to eschew these...sidelines of yours, to live a private life, and perhaps occasionally allow some invention – as innocuous as that scrap of magic paper we confiscated from Mrs. Bannister – to be used for the public good... Well, then, we might all get on peaceably together.”

“And will I find myself spied on, to ensure that these conditions are followed?”

“I am willing to trust your word, if you will trust mine, Mr. Cole.”

“I shall take that,” Cole answered dryly, “as a yes.”

“Take it as you will.” Avery’s expression darkened. “I think you’ll discover that I am being extremely generous. Not many politically dangerous individuals receive the same consideration.”

“Oh, I am well aware of _that_ ,” Cole answered, and for a moment, I feared that he might finally lose his temper.

“You are a scientist, not a freedom fighter,” said General Avery. “You would do well to remember that. If you forget it, you shall be reminded. Have I made myself clear?”

Benjamin had control of himself once more, though his voice was filled with acid. “Perfectly, sir.”

“And,” Avery added. “I want the dragon.”

“You shan’t get her,” Cole said.

“We shall see.”

He walked behind the desk with measured steps before he turned and leaned forward, hands planted on its leather surface. The light behind turned him into a dark outline, and for the first time, I noticed that the window faced out into Imperial Square, where Benjamin had once seen his master burned.

“You are dismissed,” the General said. “You may take the good doctor with you, given that he has served his purpose. But I would ask you to keep the conditions of your parole in mind – keep them in mind at every hour, every day. When you are mixing your alchemical preparations. When you read one of the approved city newspapers. When you sit down to dinner with your...companions. Remember that, whenever your capacity for trouble outweighs your usefulness, all of this may be taken away from you. Francis Mortimer gave us better service than ever you did, Mr. Cole. Remember his fate.”


	14. Chapter 14

The rest of that day, I can recall only in flashes. I remember the King beaming at us, just as though some victory had been won; I remember a brief and humiliating ceremony in which we – and Benjamin in particular – were presented to some other members of Government, like a quarry before a chase. I remember finally being permitted to leave, and parting from him and Charles at the Palace back gate.

They would proceed directly to Aurelian Street, while an army carriage waited to take me to Mannering Terrace, where I was assured my brother had already been released. I wanted to see James safe as soon as I could, and yet I still could not shake the feeling that we were all going to our doom, and would never meet again. It was only after the door had shut behind me and the horses moved off that I realised that Cole was no longer carrying his carpet-bag.

By then, the short afternoon was already fading towards night. Through the carriage window, I saw the citizens of Haven hurrying about their tasks, gathering to talk in coffee shops or on street corners. That evening’s papers, I was sure, would be full of reports of the dragon over the city: they would call it a daring New Carthaginian attack, and the Generality would be in no hurry to disabuse them.

Politics might sway in one direction or another, for a while; there might be headlines and speeches and even fire from heaven. But for these people in the streets, the ordinary, law-abiding people of the Middle Kingdoms, did anything ever truly change?

The door was opened to me by a distressed housemaid, after I had given assurances that I was family and not a patient. Going past, I examined her plain, honest face for a moment longer than was necessary, wondering what allegiances it hid, and despised myself for doing so.

The house was as quiet as a place of mourning, only a few rooms on the first floor dimly lit. When I pushed open the sitting-room door, Meg started so violently that I was frightened for her, dropping the embroidery she held in her lap as she rose. “Oh, Phoebe!”

I embraced her, feeling her tremble in my arms. I had feared there might be thanks that I did not deserve, but of course she had no way of knowing what was behind James’s release; if she suspected that his association with us had led to his arrest, she was kind enough never to say so. 

My brother was there also, huddled in a chair by the fire with a glass of hot port, a blanket over his shoulders. His eyes were open, but he did not acknowledge my entrance, or answer when I tried to speak to him.

“Is he all right?” I asked anxiously, after Meg drew me back out of the room and up to her own parlour. It was still decorated in pastels and hung with pretty drawings of flowers and sea-views, as it had been when Charles and I came for dinner, scarcely a week ago. But Meg herself I found almost inexpressibly changed, all the soft curves of her face settled into new lines.

“He’ll be better after a day or two – in his own house, with his family around him. I’ve bandaged the shackle marks on his wrists…” She sank into an armchair on a shaky breath, rubbing her fingers idly over the floral upholstery. “The twins have gone up to bed. They’re very young; perhaps they won’t remember this ever happened.”

“They’ll remember,” I said quietly. I wondered if she knew the truth about our own parents; perhaps now, I thought, James might tell her. “Are _you_ all right, Meg?”

“Oh, yes.” She looked up, her brown eyes staring through me. “Some of James’s patients are involved in politics and thinking of standing for Parliament, if an election is forced through. I know their wives; I intend to go and speak to them soon. We’re also on calling terms with some junior Generality members, but as they have been no help so far, I don’t suppose I can get much use out of the acquaintance. And I shall write to my father too, he must have friends in the merchant party.”

I gasped, reaching for her hand. “But do you know what you’re doing? It is dangerous to bring attention...”

“More dangerous than James’s arrest?” Meg’s gaze focused and sharpened. “I used to think that such things could never happen to us – not to a well-to-do, _nice_ family living in the New Town. Now I see that it can...that it can happen to anyone. Is that the world I want my sons to grow up in, a world of fear and caution? There must be something I can do. I’ll raise a scandal if I have to – see who else in this neighbourhood would object to being carted off in the middle of the night.”

I stared at my sister-in-law in mingled awe and horror. I knew that she did not need my blessing or my well-wishes, but I went over to her silently, and for a moment we clung to each other once more like refugees in a storm.

On my way out, I stopped by James’s chair and smoothed the hair back from his face. “Come and see us tomorrow, if you are strong enough,” I said quietly. “Mr. Cole can make you an ointment for your wrists.” He turned his head up to me, with the haunted look I had last seen after our parents died, when our house was filled with sad, well-meaning strangers and James had circulated in his new black frockcoat, being polite to them all. “You can come by after we shut,” I said, “or any time. I would so like to see you.” And I set the front-door key by his elbow, as a token of welcome.  

“Thank you, Phoebe,” he said, visibly rallying, as reached past me for his glass of port. “I do appreciate you calling on Margaret at this difficult time. Most kind.” He did not realise, of course, how much harder this tone was for me to bear than his earlier vulnerability. For a moment, he had been my brother again.

I saw myself out, and went on foot the long way down to the Old Town, hoping the cold air might bring some clarity in my thoughts. Instead I arrived lonely and afraid, starting at shadows, longing for the comfort of my own home at last.

It was evident that the house had been searched in our absence, and hastily tidied since. My ledgers were piled up anyhow on the table in the front room, the door to the inner laboratory stood open, and several jars of ingredients were missing their lids. I wondered what else we might find missing, in time. It looked as though a strong wind had blown through, setting everything awry.

The upstairs sitting-room was much the same, except that they were all there – including Edith, who kneeled by the hearth to sweep out the fire. Her pale face was blotched with weeping and her braid coming undone around her face; Charles stood near her, speaking softly. As soon as she saw me come in, Edith rose and ran over with fresh tears running down her cheeks.

“Oh ma’am, I am so sorry, I did not mean to…”

I took her by the shoulders. “It’s all right,” I said meaninglessly, “it’s all right.”

“Mr. Templer might have died and it was all my fault!”

“He didn’t, however,” Benjamin said. He was leaning over the dining table and writing something quickly, scarcely stopping to dip his pen in the inkwell. “Our friends at the Generality were too enamoured of their new wonder, and did not think to use some common poison. And it was a weak enough dose.”

“I put in as little as I could,” Edith sobbed. “But when you said that he might die, oh—”

He interrupted her, in the same business-like tone. “Do you plan to return up North, Miss Vogel?”

She nodded, tremulously. “I’ll have to, sir. I’ll never find another place in Haven without a character.”

“I’ll give you one,” I offered. My heart still froze at the thought of Charles’s illness, and yet I could not blame this tearful girl for it. She had only been a pawn, like the rest of us. “I know you had no choice.”

She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief and raised reddened eyes to mine. “Thank you, ma’am, you’re very kind to say so. But I couldn’t accept it – after all I’ve done, I’d be too ashamed to take your charity. And I do want to see my family, make sure they’re well as I was promised.”

“Will you perform a service for me on your way?” Cole asked.

“Anything, sir, I swear it.”

“Here, then.” He blotted the pages he’d written and sealed them. “Make sure this reaches a man called Sigmund Muir, a bookseller in Elmsburg. And then you must forget you ever heard his name.”

“Yes, sir,” Edith promised. Within ten minutes, she was gone: she had already packed all her small store of possessions, the bundles lined up by the door, and the room was as neat as hurried, guilty labour could make it. She slipped Cole’s packet into one of her bags, tied on her warmest shawl, and with a final nod she left us. I listened to her footsteps descending down the stairs and out through the shop, and then the fading jangle of the bell.

“It is all nonsense, of course,” Cole said, into the resulting silence, “about untrustworthy servants and Northerners. Nonsense and baseless prejudice, I hope we are all agreed. The girl was in an untenable position; anyone might have acted the same way.”

“Of course,” Charles said, and then, “What was in that packet?”

“Nothing substantive.” He straightened and smoothed down his jacket, as though with that gesture he could resume the equilibrium of our ordinary lives. “Final instructions for Jewkes, and for the rest of my associates. I thought I might take this opportunity to advise them that I will henceforth be out of communication, that’s all.”

“Benjamin—”

“Don’t,” Cole bit out. There was something desperate and cornered in his face. “What would you have me do? I cannot risk it. If you must know, I swore an oath to the General in exchange for our parole.”

“We know,” Charles said heavily. “We know everything, not only the few facts you told me on our way here. His Majesty allowed us to overhear your conversation.”

“I see.” The desperation eased; instead, more than at any point during that endless day of madness, he looked like a man facing the pyre. I, in my turn, wished that I could melt into the wallpaper: it must have galled him to have me as a witness.

“Why did you go refuse to go to New Carthage?” Charles asked.

“New Carthage is a dream,” Benjamin told him. “It has not existed for over a hundred years: our enlightened government has destroyed it. All their energies now, like ours, are turned to the war.”

“Surely not all,” Charles said, cautiously probing. “Surely you might have found somewhere, to work in the way that you wish. Surely you did not need to...”

“For God’s sake, Charles!” Benjamin exploded, half-turning away. “I did not realise you were so eager for my departure. Only say the word and I shall affect it forthwith.”

“That wasn’t—” Charles began, but he was too tired to go on with it. He limped off upstairs in frustration, and I hesitated for only a moment before I followed him.

I found him sitting on the bed with his jacket off and necktie undone, head bowed over his hands. “I don’t understand it,” he muttered, only half to me. “For once there ought to be no secrets between us, and yet still I do not understand him. Could  it have been patriotism, at the last? Even faced with the ugly pettiness of it all? He cannot be happy like this – constantly watched, forced to sell to the Generality as he has always sworn not to do.”

It was the worst possible time, of course I knew that. We were all utterly exhausted, hardly knowing whether to feel despairing or relieved: our daily lives lay scatterred about us like a hastily-discarded suit of clothes. And yet, in the face of his obvious misery, I found I could do nothing but tell the truth openly. Charles was right: the time for secrets had gone.

“My dear,” I said, as gently as I could. “New Carthage has not been a true possibility for him – not for years, and not because of the blockade. He knew, you see, that _you_ could never be happy there.”

“I have never sought to influence...” Charles began, helplessly.

I longed to go to him, and yet I knew that I could not, not at this crucial juncture. As his wife, I was the last person in the world who could guide him. Instead, whatever pain I felt, I must strive to be as distant and impartial as the foreign goddess from whom I took my name.

“I know you haven’t meant to,” I told him. “And yet, this isn’t the first time that he has given up something fundamental for your sake.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Oh, my dear,” my reserve breaking for an instant, “I cannot believe you to be so blind.”

He looked up at me, his hazel eyes wide and startled. I saw that he had lived for three years without acknowledging this truth, even to himself; in marrying me, he had been willing to spend his entire life denying it.

“He loves you,” I whispered. “And because he has sometimes believed that you might care for him in turn – as I know you do – he is prepared to stand the torment. For you are worth a great deal of torment, Charles.”

“Of course,” he tried to protest, “Benjamin is like a brother to me…”

“He’s in love with you,” I said, because Benjamin Cole had also taught me how to be merciless: a scalpel, slicing through living tissue. “And you with him, even if you’ve never admitted as much. But I can see it clearly.” My voice wavered. “I am the only one who can see it clearly.”

Charles buried his face in his hands, with a stifled cry that tore at my heart. I went to kneel on the rug beside the bed, close enough to feel his warmth, but still I did not touch him.

“Phoebe,” he said at last, and his attempt at composure was more terrible than any outward suffering might have been. “I am so very sorry. If only I had been less selfish – less blind, as you say – I would have realised how deeply I’ve been hurting you. I thought the politics were the worst of it. But now I swear, we shall leave at once. We shall leave and begin our own life anew, and we shall never look back.”

I could not bear it any longer. Perhaps ninety-nine women in a hundred – sane women, well-brought-up, respectable women – would have accepted his promise at face value, would have responded as he expected me to respond. Instead, I seized his wrists between mine, holding them too tightly, as though through that mere pressure I could force him to comprehension.

The cure for the poisonous form of transformation brought on by the Tincture was distillate of lunary, whose common name is _honesty_. And if I were being fully honest now, I would admit that I, too, was too deeply tied to that house and all it held to ever wish to leave.

I did not have the words for it. All I could say was, “Oh, Charles. Did you think that I would force you to choose?”

*

When at last we went downstairs again, it was deep night. Cole had closed the shutters and extinguished the candles, and was crouching by the fireplace in his dressing-gown, feeding papers into the flames. He was burning his New Carthaginian incense again – because he liked it, I hoped, and not as a reminder of all he could not have. I realised that the sharp smell of it, which had so choked me only weeks before, was now the scent of home.

Some odds and ends of food from the kitchen were set out on the table, but they did not seem to have been touched. None of us had much appetite.

“Ah, Templer,” he said in some approximation of his ordinary tone, without looking away from the hearth. “Do you know, I have been thinking of writing a study on the lesser-known properties of phlogiston?”

“Benjamin…”

“Oh, never fret so, my dear fellow. There are far worse things in life than straightforward alchemical employment. Once the aftershocks of all this excitement fade, I think you’ll find that we shall manage very well. There is the sympathetic paper to develop, first of all, and a host of other things I have not previously had the time for. And then—”

Charles said his name again, moving into the circle of light, and Benjamin looked up.

We had talked for a long time together, Charles and I – haltingly, sometimes too overcome with mortification to go on – and through it at all my love for him had only deepened. No one who had fought in New Carthage and gone through the events of the past several days might have been called a coward: at last, I had watched him apply that same native courage to the analysis of his own feelings, while doing his best to spare mine.

He never apologised for having married me, or forswore any of the vows he had made me but the one, and I was grateful for his candour and kindness. That same candour and kindness meant that he would not retreat into half-measures now, before he had fully declared himself.

He had asked me, gentle and undemanding, whether I would be willing to be there with him, and I had been unable say no. And so I waited, still in the shadows, while Charles knelt by the fire and took Benjamin’s hand in his. “Why did you never tell me?”

To his credit, he did not once attempt to deny it. “How could I?” he asked, on a broken laugh. “How could I say to the man who came to live with me, saved me when I was at my very lowest, offered me his fellowship… How could I tell him: not only have you lifted me out of my stupor to struggle against everything that you hold dear, but I also harbour designs upon your person which you would doubtless find repugnant and perverse?”

Charles shook his head; he spoke for some while, head bent, too quiet for me to hear more than the earnest tenor of his voice.

“But _now_?” Cole replied, outrage overlaid with a high note of surprise and strain. “Surely it cannot be now. Charles, you do not know what you are saying.”

If Charles had chosen to continue talking, they might have been there all night: Benjamin Cole was not one to back down from an argument. And so, instead, Charles simply took his face between his hands and kissed him.

It was a tentative thing at first, one uncertain and the other unresponsive, holding himself back with the adamantine restraint he must have practiced for years. I dug my ragged fingernails deep into my palms and held my breath, lest I do anything to prejudice this fragile balance. The clock ticked: a log fell and snapped in the fire.

Cole’s patience seemed to snap with it. He made a sound deep in his throat and brought his hand up to the back of Charles’s head, holding him still while he kissed him in earnest. The incense filled my lungs: there was no air in the room left to breathe.

It lasted only a moment, before he pushed Charles away and retreated, gracelessly, until the armchair was at his back. Charles – dazed, flushed with a look I had only seen him wear before when we were alone, inexpressibly beautiful – seemed to have forgotten about my presence. But Benjamin, trapped there like an animal at bay, turned unerringly to look toward me.

His lean face was both weary and utterly naked, vulnerable with new-born hope and disbelief. I could shatter him, I thought, at a word: if there had been any instinct of jealousy or vengeance in me, surely I would have done it then. If I had been a woman more capable of selfless sacrifice, surely I would have left them together. But I could bear to do neither, standing frozen in the shadows.

“Miss Bannister,” he said. “Phoebe—”

When I was a secretary at Feversham Academy, I had been willingly resigned to a spinster life, for I did not believe myself capable of loving any man. To discover now that I might love two at once, and two such different men, was hardly the least surprising revelation of the past few days. I had thought myself so ruthless in examining _their_ feelings – I had hardly attended to my own.

I raised my palms to my face, which was hot and damp with tears, and I believe that I said something foolish, some instinctive apology. But they took pity upon me; they drew me in, one upon each side, and it was both comfort and a dizzy drowning, to have Charles hold me while Benjamin touched my fingers to his lips.

It was all so simple after all, I thought, giddy: the marriage of the three sophic elements. And when I said as much, far later in the night, not even Benjamin Cole reproved the extravagant image.

*

Charles had the easiest time of it, adjusting to our new situation – though a man of deep feeling, as I had cause to know, he was a resilient soul and had lost much of his capacity for shock. In the morning, he took his affectionate leave of us both and set off into a day of unseasonable sunshine, to begin the task of replenishing ingredients and re-establishing trade arrangements, humming quietly with his walking-stick under his arm.

Yet I felt unaccountably shy as Benjamin and I worked at the shop that day, watching surreptitiously while he mixed his powders and potions: shirtsleeves rolled up over his bony elbows, utterly concentrated on his work. Knowing, now, the passion of which he was capable, I could only wonder at how long and ruthlessly it had been repressed.

By afternoon, of course, he had noticed that I was not paying the strictest attention to the reordering of the account-books, my thoughts drifting to the dusty-motes floating in the fading sunlight and the movement of his hands.

“I am just about finished here, Miss Bannister,” he said dryly. “If you consider your working day to be concluded, you may proceed upstairs.”

Fortunately for domestic harmony, I was becoming as immune to his manner as Charles was. “Very well, then,” I said.

I tidied up the writing things at the counter, locked up the front door and closed the blinds, before coming around to his workbench at the back of the shop. I leaned against it, careful not to get in his way. He pretended not to notice me, naturally, but I saw the added tension in the set of his shoulders and around his mouth: we were not yet completely easy with each other.

“We’ll need to see about getting a daily charwoman, hopefully one who can prepare our meals,” I said. “I’ll buy our dinner in today, but we cannot afford it regularly.”

“I am content to leave the matter in your capable hands.”

“I’ll put up an advertisement at the grocer’s.” Still I fidgeted, unable to explain or dispel my nerves. “Charles should be getting back soon,” I offered.

“I expect so.” He barely glanced up at me, his hands still busy with the mortar and pestle.

I realised, then, that all gains were reversible and that nothing could be taken for granted: I knew that such, at least, would be what Benjamin would think. It was not that he did not trust us, but he distrusted happiness: he supposed it to be capable of dissolving in daylight, as easily as a somnifer dream.

“We’ll be waiting for you,” I said, and then I put my hand on his bare neck and stood on tip-toe to kiss him: a promise, warm and brief.

When I let go, his face was utterly impassive. I was half-certain that he would reproach me for it – was there ever a soul more averse to casual displays of affection, when nobody’s life was at risk? – but then I saw the slight softening in his eyes, something that might have been a smile. “And a good afternoon to you, Miss Bannister,” he said.

I turned to leave the shop with a spring in my step, convinced of the bounty and rightness of the universe. And then I saw my brother standing just inside the door, his expression of dismay testifying clearly to what he had witnessed. I had forgotten about giving him the key; and of course, the bell had been muffled.

“Hello, James,” I said, determined to brazen it out if possible. “Have you come about the poultice? Mr. Cole should have it ready.”

“Ah—yes. That is…” He coughed to clear his throat. Poor James: he had such a hatred of unexpected events, and this week had provided a surfeit of them. He looked better, at least: barbered and impeccably dressed, every inch the society doctor. “In fact, I wished to speak to you – in private, if possible.”

“Of course,” I said briskly. “Do come upstairs.”

I got him seated in the parlour with a cup of tea I made myself – my abilities did extend that far – chattering all the while about Meg and the boys, and hoping that this would serve to distract him. “Now,” I said, “what was it you wanted to ask me?”

James bent his head, worrying at his cuffs where the marks of the shackles were just visible. “I was arrested, Phoebe, and I think I have a right to know why. They kept asking me about the cases I had witnessed…”

He was right: he had a right to some of the truth at least. “You stumbled upon a secret Generality experiment,” I said, “and came to the alchemist best equipped to discover it. The Generality, you see, does not take kindly to being discovered.”

“But I broke no laws!”

“ _We_ may have done,” I admitted. “Mr. Cole can be very determined.”

I should have known that my brother would not let the subject drop so easily. “Yes,” James said, with sudden urgency. “Phoebe, what I saw downstairs, between you and him—”

“I am very sorry about that,” I cut in. “I should have known that you’d get the wrong idea entirely.”

But James was on familiar ground now, as _pater familias_ and bastion of respectability, and he was not about to relinquish it. In a way, I believe he was even relishing the opportunity to put the prison cell out of his mind and regain the moral high ground. “I fail to see,” he said sternly, “how your actions may possibly be misinterpreted. And I must say, Phoebe, that I am inordinately disappointed in you. To be thus deceiving your husband, in his own house – under his very nose, as it were – and with his partner and friend...!”

I thought that he might forget himself and go on to the memory of our parents next (the posthumous version that he had created for society’s benefit, in any case) and how ashamed they would be, after all that they had taught us of morality. And suddenly I could not bear it.

“James,” I said, with all the firmness I could manage. “There is no deception. It isn’t at all what you’re thinking – it isn’t _sordid_. Only it seems that I really do care for them both, and they care for each other, so what else could we do that wouldn’t lead to misery?”

If I had thought him pale and shocked before, it was nothing to the way he looked now. “You mean to say…” James swallowed convulsively. “All three of you?”

As a doctor, he surely knew his share of family secrets; still, I had not thought that he would understand me so quickly. It was a relief not to have to explain any further, although  I knew that I could hardly expect his blessing.

He pulled away from me, in fact, as though my very presence was poison. I wished that I had not told him: he looked as though he was about to be ill. “I cannot stand this,” James said in a stifled voice, more to himself than to me. “Policemen – arrest – patients dying senselessly – my own wife talking about becoming involved in politics – and now _you_ , Phoebe, letting me down like this when I had thought you safely settled! What sort of world is this? I am a _doctor_ – a gentleman!”

I had been prepared for outrage, but his petty selfishness tried my patience at the same time as it frightened me. “What sort of world was it,” I demanded, “when a clergyman and his wife were drowned for their opinions? When we must all turn on each other and betray and denounce, only to keep our tenuous foothold in society? If that world is changing at last, however slowly, then I thank God for it, and pray that you and your kind shall not stop it.”

“I won’t,” James said after a long moment, in a stifled voice, “I won’t denounce you. But if you so much as breathe a word of further scandal on our family…”

The tension between my shoulders, where I had been holding myself with Feversham-trained comportment, eased the tiniest fraction. “There won’t be any scandal of that kind. The General said our…private domestic arrangements did not concern him. Alchemists are expected to be eccentric, you know. And Benjamin—” I nearly added that he had sworn to abandon his dissident activities, but there was no need for James to know that he had ever engaged in them. Having to guard my words before my own brother was bitter, but surely necessary in this only slowly changing world.

“ _Benjamin_ ,” he echoed, scornfully. “I might have expected it of him, with his black magic and unconventional methods. But Charles Templer – an army man!”

“Yes, well.” There seemed no purpose in prolonging it. “People underestimate Charles at their peril, as surely you must have discovered when he diagnosed and cured his own condition before your eyes. Now, are you planning to stay for dinner? I shall need to go out to buy it.”

I watched him contemplate the prospect of sharing our dinner table: in other circumstances, it might have been comic, but now his look of horror only gave me additional pain. “No, I imagine not,” I answered myself. “Meg will be missing you.”

“Yes,” James said, almost grateful. “I told Margaret I’d be home by six.”

“Then you had best be hurrying back.”

“Yes,” he repeated. We stood, our teacups untouched before us. “Phoebe,” he began uncertainly.

I suddenly felt rather sorry for him. “Forgive me for springing it on you like this, my dear. But we all have to find our happiness in our own way, in these dark times. I hope you’ll see that someday. Till then, goodbye.”

We shook hands very formally, and I watched him retreat down the stairs. I noticed that he left the shop key on the sideboard: a good thing on the whole, as I had forgotten to ask him for it, yet it still sharpened the dull ache in my heart.

_To cleave and join together_ : that was the first dictum of alchemy. For all its ancient promises of gold and life eternal, a true alchemist had to know that there could be no benefit without its cost. We had all learned that, many times over.

And yet James was also my brother, and there are some affinities in nature that resist decomposition, and cannot be broken by artificial means. So I hoped it would prove.

I realised that I was still standing in the middle of the room, gazing at the empty doorway. I shook myself awake: Benjamin would be finished in the shop soon – I could only hope that he had remembered the poultice – and Charles would be getting back. I had to see about our dinner, and then I had some letters of my own to write. We would be cautious, of course; we had so much to lose. But I had been silent too long for caution’s sake.

The rest would surely follow. Not in the ways one might expect, if one relied on romantic literature and a conventional upbringing, and not always for the best; and yet I was still young and sure of my own abilities, and there were two brilliant men who loved me. Together, the future was a riddle we could solve.

_End._


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